A dialogue system for accessing drug reviews

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework which harvests grassroots-generated data from the Web (e.g., reviews, blogs), extracts latent information from these data, and provides a multimodal interface for review browsing and inquiring. A prescription-drug domain system is implemented under this framework. Patient-provided drug reviews were collected from various health-related forums, from which significant side effects correlated to each drug type were identified with association algorithms. A multimodal web-based spoken dialogue system was implemented to allow users to inquire about drugs and correlated side effects as well as browsing the reviews obtained from the Web. We report evaluation results on speech recognition, parse coverage and system response.