Towards Building a Virtual Assistant Health Coach

Itika Gupta, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian D. Ziebart, Bing Liu, Ben S. Gerber, Lisa K. Sharp, Rafe Davis, Aiswarya Baiju

Abstract: In this paper, we present our data collection process, annotation schemas and agreement results for extracting health goals from SMS conversations between a health coach and the patients. We also discuss our preliminary results for automatically detecting topic boundaries in health coaching dialogues. This is our first step towards building an autonomous virtual assistant health coach that learns from expert demonstration to interact with patients via SMS.