Annotating Discourse Zones in Medical Interviews

We improve a visual analytics workflow for analyzing medical interviews by introducing a discourse annotation scheme for creating an effective multi-document visualization that also facilitates inter-document comparisons. We introduce the concept of discourse zones for bringing together the many disparate terms and concepts used in various research areas. The zones are generalized for usage toward any institutional dyad setting (attorney-witness, teacher-student, physician-patient, etc.), including emergency hotlines and switchboards. Our task involves visually identifying the medical problems, their solutions, and contexts in medical encounters (i.e., dialogue-based conversations and interviews). The corpora consists of medical interviews between clinicians and caregivers of children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).