Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Conversational AI for Digital Health: From Yesterday to Tomorrow

Half-day tutorial at INTERSPEECH 2023.

Overview

In the past few years, dozens of surveys have revealed a scarcity of healthcare professionals, particularly psychiatrists, limiting access to healthcare for severely ill individuals. With the motivation of efficiently utilizing doctors' time and providing an accessible platform for early diagnosis, clinical assistance using artificial intelligence is gaining immense popularity and demand in both research and industry communities. As a result, telemedicine has grown substantially in recent years, particularly since the COVID outbreak. The tutorial aims to present a comprehensive overview of the use of conversational agents in healthcare, including recent advancements and future prospects. The tutorial will also provide a demonstration of our newly developed virtual disease diagnosis assistant. The tutorial has been crafted with fundamentals to advanced concepts in mind, which makes it beneficial for researchers who are beginners or experts.

Objective

By attending this tutorial, participants will learn about:

Background and Motivation: the existing limitations in digital health in the realms of NLP specifically VAs and the recent upcoming frameworks which alleviate these limitations and enhance their capabilities
Fundamentals of Dialogue Systems: the basics of a Dialogue System aka Conversational AI and the recent most emerging branches of communication with the end user
State-of-art Models: the most successful techniques addressing multiple sub-modules of a VA for both physical and mental health
Live Demonstration: for practical exposure, the tutorial will also provide a live demonstration of the recently published
Future Directions: Some pressing challenges to the adoption of AI in healthcare, such as Reliability, Explainability, and Safety (RES) as well as discuss possible remedies to accelerate progress in this area

Materials

Tutorial Slide

Schedule and Venue Details

Date and Time: August 20, 2023, 2 - 5 PM

Venue: Convention Centre Dublin, Ireland

Organizers

Relevant Publications

A large-scale dataset for motivational dialogue system: An application of natural language generation to mental health-Saha, T., Chopra, S., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P., & Kumar, P. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2021, Link
Towards A Motivational Virtual Assistant for Assuaging Mental Agony-Saha, T., Reddy, S., Das, A., Saha, S., & Bhattacharyya, P., North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2022), Link
Towards Motivational and Empathetic Response Generation in Online Mental Health-Saha, T., Gakhreja, V., Das, A. S., Chakraborty, S., & Saha, S, Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 2022. Link
Mental Health Disorder Identification From Motivational Conversations- Saha, T., Reddy, S. M., Saha, S., & Bhattacharyya, P, (2022) Link
Dr. Can See: Towards Multimodal Disease Diagnosis- Tiwari, A., Manthena, M., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P., Dhar, M., & Tiwari, S., 31st ACM international conference on information & knowledge management (CIKM 2022), Link
System and Method For Automated Disease Diagnosis- Tiwari, A., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P., & Dhar, M., Indian Patent, Under review
A knowledge infused context driven dialogue agent for disease diagnosis using hierarchical reinforcement learning- Tiwari, A., Saha, S., & Bhattacharyya, P. (2022), Knowledge-Based Systems 242 (2022): 108292, Link
Symptoms are known by their companies: towards association guided disease diagnosis assistant-Tiwari, A., Saha, T., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P., Begum, S., Dhar, M., & Tiwari, S, BMC Bioinformatics(2022) Link
Towards Symptom Assessment Guided Symptom Investigation and Disease Diagnosis-Tiwari, A., Raj, R., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P., Tiwari, S., & Dhar, M. IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (2023) Link