The AI Doctor Is In: A Survey of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems for Healthcare Applications
Mina Valizadeh, Natalie Parde · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2022
Task-oriented dialogue systems are increasingly prevalent in healthcare settings, and have been characterized by a diverse range of architectures and objectives.Although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from a non-technical perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous computational perspective has to date remained noticeably absent.As a result, many important implementation details of healthcare-oriented dialogue systems remain limited or underspecified, slowing the pace of innovation in this area.To fill this gap, we investigated an initial pool of 4070 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence venues, identifying 70 papers discussing the system-level implementation of task-oriented dialogue systems for healthcare applications.We conducted a comprehensive technical review of these papers, and present our key findings including identified gaps and corresponding recommendations.