Constructing a Chinese Medical Conversation Corpus Annotated with Conversational Structures and Actions

Abstract

Overuse of antibiotics and the attributed bacterial resistance is one of the most serious global public health crises today. Previous research reported that patients' advocacy for antibiotic treatment was consequential on antibiotic over-prescribing. To investigate how the advocacy and other factors contribute to antibiotic over-prescribing, qualitative and quantitative analysis of doctor-patient conversation can yield valuable findings. In this paper, we introduce AMed (Annotated Corpus of Medical Conversations), a manually transcribed corpus of medical dialogue in Chinese pediatric consultations, with annotation of conversational structures and actions. Based on the annotation, a significant association between patient request for antibiotic and antibiotic over-prescribing is discovered. As this corpus is the first with annotation of conversational structures and actions on medical consultation conversations in Chinese, it can be a valuable resource for discourse and dialogue research in general, and for the understanding of human collaboration and negotiation behavior in clinical consultations in particular. Furthermore, findings from analyses of the corpus can shed light on ways to improve physician-patient communication in order to reduce antibiotic over-prescribing.

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