Corpora: Summary: Doctor-Patient Consultations

[Mark G Lee]

Hello

Here is a summary of my earlier question regards corpora of
doctor-patient interactions.

Thanks to :

Matthew Purver Kings College London
Harold Somers UMIST
Francis Rock University of Roehampton
Bill Mann SIL International
David Lee University of Lancaster
Nick Smith University of Lancaster
Yorick Wilks University of Sheffield
Lex Olorenshaw SLT
Jochen Leidner University of Cambridge
David Oakey University of Birmingham

What follows are selected quotes from everybody and a few references:

Matthew Purver/David Lee/Harold Somers all suggested the British
National Corpus which contains about 100 examples of short (300900
words) medical consultations in GP surgeries or hospitals, already
annotated for POS tags and some other aspects.

David Lee writes

>A concordance on 'pain' reveals 68 hits in 38 unique files among these
>119. This means that you potentially have a corpus of 38 files (with a
>total of 34,010 words) to work with (though whether the pain is
>'chronic' or not you'll have to judge for yourself). You can find these
>doctor-patient files using my BNC Indexer (see
>http://www.davidlee00.freeserve.co.uk/corpus_resources.htm or the Web
>Indexer at
>http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/ucrel/bncindex/).


Francis Rock/Nick Smith/Harold Somers/Jochen Leidner all suggest looking
at Jenny Thomas & Andrew Wilson's work

Jochen writes:

> Jenny Thomas <http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ling/staff/els01a/jenny.htm>
> is probably one of the main author to read if you're interested in
> doctor-patient interaction. During her time at Lancaster, Jenny did
> two studies investigating communication with respeact to cancer patients:
>
>   - Evaluating the Quality of Communication within the Lancaster
>     Cancer-Care System (1989-93) and
>
>   - A Comparative Study of Patient Satisfaction with Cancer Treatment in
>     Rural and Urban Practices within the Lancaster District Health
>     Authority (1992-94).
>
> There are a couple of paper's around that document these efforts,
> including descriptions how corpus-based methods have been applied.
>

Harold also writes:

>Several other similar corpora have been collected, e.g. by Thomas and
>Wilson (1996), Wynn (1999). Other researchers have collections of tape-
>recordings (See for example
>ww2.mcgill.ca/Psychiatry/transcultural/primary.html) and there are even
>conferences dedicated to the analysis of doctorpatient discourse (For
>example, the Conference on Medical Interaction, 18-20 October 2000, at
>the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. See
>http://www.conversation-analysis.net/Conferences/Medical/program_doc-pat.htm.


>Thomas, J. and A. Wilson. 1996. Methodologies for studying a corpus of
>doctor-patient interaction. In J. Thomas and M. Short (eds) Using
>Corpora for Language Research, London: Longman, pp. 92109.

>Wynn, R. 1999. ProviderPatient Interaction: A Corpus-Based Study of
>DoctorPatient and StudentPatient Interaction.< Kristiansand, Norway:
>Hyskoleforlaget.


Bill Mann writes

>I am just now studying a book on this: The Discourse of Medicine, by
>Elliot G. Mischler, a 1984 book from Ablex.  He discusses the art of
>studying medical interviews, and in particular he identifies a number
>of flaws in past work.  He studies several actual cases, useing a
>Conversational Analysis approach.

>I found it useful at the framework and criticism levels, and there are
>several dialogues in there that I will probably use to exercise a
>theory.



David Oakey writes

>I saw a paper ("Just Checking: Questions and Social Roles") by Geoff
>Thompson at the Questions conference in Liverpool a couple of years ago
>where he looked at evidence from his own (I think) corpus of doctor-patient
>consultations. He referred to his paper Thompson G. 1999 "Acting the part:
>lexico-grammatical choices and contextual factors." in M. Ohadessy (ed.) Tex<italic>t
>and Context in Functional Linguistics.</italic> Amsterdam: Benjamins, 103-126.


Yorick Wilks pointed me to Bonnie Webbers work on the TraumAID project
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~traumaid/

and also (with Alison Cawsey & Ray Jones)

A. Cawsey, B. Webber & R. Jones
Natural Language Generation in Healthcare, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 4(6) November - December 1997, pp. 473-482

Lex Olorenshaw suggests looking at


http://smi-web.stanford.edu/projects/miigweb/


(also available at http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/bonnie/bonnie.html)

Thanks to everybody for the advice,

Best regards

Mark


Dept of Computer Science | mgl at cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham | http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl