Brian Ziebart


2024

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Modeling Low-Resource Health Coaching Dialogues via Neuro-Symbolic Goal Summarization and Text-Units-Text Generation
Yue Zhou | Barbara Di Eugenio | Brian Ziebart | Lisa Sharp | Bing Liu | Nikolaos Agadakos
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Health coaching helps patients achieve personalized and lifestyle-related goals, effectively managing chronic conditions and alleviating mental health issues. It is particularly beneficial, however cost-prohibitive, for low-socioeconomic status populations due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic goal summarizer to support health coaches in keeping track of the goals and a text-units-text dialogue generation model that converses with patients and helps them create and accomplish specific goals for physical activities. Our models outperform previous state-of-the-art while eliminating the need for predefined schema and corresponding annotation. We also propose a new health coaching dataset extending previous work and a metric to measure the unconventionality of the patient’s response based on data difficulty, facilitating potential coach alerts during deployment.

2022

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Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings
Yue Zhou | Barbara Di Eugenio | Brian Ziebart | Lisa Sharp | Bing Liu | Ben Gerber | Nikolaos Agadakos | Shweta Yadav
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.

2020

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Human-Human Health Coaching via Text Messages: Corpus, Annotation, and Analysis
Itika Gupta | Barbara Di Eugenio | Brian Ziebart | Aiswarya Baiju | Bing Liu | Ben Gerber | Lisa Sharp | Nadia Nabulsi | Mary Smart
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Our goal is to develop and deploy a virtual assistant health coach that can help patients set realistic physical activity goals and live a more active lifestyle. Since there is no publicly shared dataset of health coaching dialogues, the first phase of our research focused on data collection. We hired a certified health coach and 28 patients to collect the first round of human-human health coaching interaction which took place via text messages. This resulted in 2853 messages. The data collection phase was followed by conversation analysis to gain insight into the way information exchange takes place between a health coach and a patient. This was formalized using two annotation schemas: one that focuses on the goals the patient is setting and another that models the higher-level structure of the interactions. In this paper, we discuss these schemas and briefly talk about their application for automatically extracting activity goals and annotating the second round of data, collected with different health coaches and patients. Given the resource-intensive nature of data annotation, successfully annotating a new dataset automatically is key to answer the need for high quality, large datasets.