Automatic labeled dialogue generation for nursing record systems

Abstract

The integration of digital voice assistants in nursing residences is becoming increasingly important to facilitate nursing productivity with documentation. A key idea behind this system is training natural language understanding (NLU) modules that enable the machine to classify the purpose of the user utterance (intent) and extract pieces of valuable information present in the utterance (entity). One of the main obstacles when creating robust NLU is the lack of sufficient labeled data, which generally relies on human labeling. This process is cost-intensive and time-consuming, particularly in the high-level nursing care domain, which requires abstract knowledge. In this paper, we propose an automatic dialogue labeling framework of NLU tasks, specifically for nursing record systems. First, we apply data augmentation techniques to create a collection of variant sample utterances. The individual evaluation result strongly shows a stratification rate, with regard to both fluency and accuracy in utterances. We also investigate the possibility of applying deep generative models for our augmented dataset. The preliminary character-based model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) obtains an accuracy of 90% and generates various reasonable texts with BLEU scores of 0.76. Secondly, we introduce an idea for intent and entity labeling by using feature embeddings and semantic similarity-based clustering. We also empirically evaluate different embedding methods for learning good representations that are most suitable to use with our data and clustering tasks. Experimental results show that fastText embeddings produce strong performances both for intent labeling and on entity labeling, which achieves an accuracy level of 0.79 and 0.78 f1-scores and 0.67 and 0.61 silhouette scores, respectively.