Leveraging Conversation Analysis and Linguistics to improve Healthcare Conversational AI systems
Ufonia is collaborating with applied linguistics researchers from Newcastle University, to investigate what makes interactions between users and conversational AI systems most effective.
The collaboration is being funded by a prestigious British Academy Innovation Fellowship, which was awarded to Dr Adam Brandt (Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics). The Fellowship is part of the British Academy’s public policy theme of ‘digital society’, which aims to understand what makes a ‘good digital society’ by “exploring the ways in which digital technologies, tools and practices shape and are shaped by our society”.
The project provides a platform for knowledge exchange between Ufonia’s Software Engineer (Joe Tindale) and AI Conversation Engineers (Nikoletta Ventoura, Rory McKinnon), and researchers from Newcastle University’s Applied Linguistics & Communication team (Dr Spencer Hazel, Reader in Applied Linguistics; Kleopatra Sideridou, PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics).
With expertise in the qualitative linguistic approach of Conversation Analysis, the Newcastle University team aims to complement the AI and Conversation Design expertise of the Ufonia team, in order to further develop Dora, Ufonia’s conversational agent. Dora is an autonomous clinical assistant that has telephone-based conversations with patients, aiming to increase the capacity and reduce the cost of care within the healthcare system.
Beyond this, findings from the project will underpin a set of guiding principles for designing effective communication through conversational AI. This will benefit other organisations offering automated services across various sectors, and contribute to research on human-AI communication.
At the end of the project, workshops (both in-person and online) will be held in order to disseminate these guiding principles with the Conversational AI community. The workshops will also provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to share understanding and best practice, for ensuring a more equitable digital society.
Project members will also be giving a presentation on the theme of ‘The Future of Healthcare’ at a British Academy Innovation Fellows event in June, and will also be presenting at the ACM Conversational User Interfaces Conference 2023 and the British Association of Applied Linguistics Conference 2023 later this summer.
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