title: DREAM: Classification scheme for dialog acts in clinical research query mediation.
abstract: Clinical data access involves complex but opaque communication between medical researchers and query analysts. Understanding such communication is indispensable for designing intelligent human-machine dialog systems that automate query formulation. This study investigates email communication and proposes a novel scheme for classifying dialog acts in clinical research query mediation. We analyzed 315 email messages exchanged in the communication for 20 data requests obtained from three institutions. The messages were segmented into 1333 utterance units. Through a rigorous process, we developed a classification scheme and applied it for dialog act annotation of the extracted utterances. Evaluation results with high inter-annotator agreement demonstrate the reliability of this scheme. This dataset is used to contribute preliminary understanding of dialog acts distribution and conversation flow in this dialog space.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hoxha
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Praveen
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chandar
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Zhe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Informatics Development, NIH Clinical Center, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cimino
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hanauer
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: chunhua@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Chunhua
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weng
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000379:methods*; D003142:Communication; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans
keywords: Clinical research query mediation dialog; Dialog act modeling; Dialog annotation scheme; Human–human conversation analysis