The AI Doctor Is In: A Survey of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems for Healthcare Applications

Anonymous

Abstract: Task-oriented dialogue systems in healthcare are attracting increased attention, and have been characterized by a diverse range of architectures and objectives. However, although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from a non-technical perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous computational perspective remains noticeably absent. As a result, many important implementation details of healthcare-oriented dialogue systems remain limited or under-specified, 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 that satisfied our defined inclusion criteria. We conducted a comprehensive technical review of the included papers, and present our findings along with identified trends and intriguing directions for future research.