A Conversational System to Assist the User when Accessing Web Sources in the Medical Domain

Abstract — The aim of our research is to develop a framework of personal conversational assistants, adapted to different types of tasks and users. In particular, we have focused on how a conversational assistant can help the users in several situations related to the medical domain, and thus can help people take care of their health. In this paper we describe how the cultural assistant could help the user in four situations: finding a new specialist, finding the closest pharmacy, consulting a specific drug prescription and making an appointment to see the doctor. Our proposal is based on the integration of language, dialogue and ontologies to assist the user when accessing different types of web sources: informational and transactional services, dictionaries, maps. We have focused in a set of selected scenarios were a conversational assistant can be useful and the conceptual and linguistic resources needed are limited. Keywords-conversational web assistant systems; ontologies; medical domain. I