Goal Summarization for Human-Human Health Coaching Dialogues

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

Abstract: Lack of physical activity has been linked to several chronic diseases. Health coaching is successful to help patients engage in healthier behaviors, but is resource intensive. Our goal is to develop a virtual health coach. In this paper, we discuss one component of our work, automatically summarizing goals set by patients during health coaching conversations that we collected and annotated. In turn, our goal summarization pipeline consists of a slot-value prediction model followed by a model that captures the higher-level conversation flow of the dialogues. We report a detailed evaluation that shows measures used for summarization such as BLEU and ROUGE, do not work well for our task.