Natural Language in Dialogue Systems . A Case Study on a Medical Application

The effective acquisition of information, along with the comprehensive dialogue system’s response, happen to be of great importance in the medical applications domain, where accuracy of information is essential and users are usually inexperienced and unwilling to participate in long, exhausting interactions. The use of natural language is a promising idea since it is direct, natural for the humans and does not require any special training. Our effort presents a natural language interaction system, developed by Hellenic partners and utilized with success in the medical domain of pneumonia treatment. Experimental results and comparisons with other approaches tabulate improvement in time response as well as in the correctness of the answers. The evaluation of the method was made using a group of 20 persons of different specialties (medical stuff/doctors/computer users/students) which were already informed about how to use the system and each one supplied 25 different questions.