Convology: an ontology for conversational agents in digital health

Abstract Conversational agents are a modality for making the human–computer interaction paradigm more friendly from the user perspective. Conversational agents rely on natural language understanding capabilities for classifying the intents that users want to communicate through open natural language text. Recently, conversational agents are equipped with background knowledge for improving the overall effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability of systems concerning the acquisition of information from the dialog management perspective. However, while the literature discussed some introductory strategies, there are no evidence that such knowledge-equipped conversational agents have been used in practice. Within the digital health domain, the use of conversational agents ranges from assisting patients during the self-management of chronic diseases to supporting physicians during daily activities. In this chapter, we propose an ontology, namely Convology, aiming to describe conversational scenarios with the scope of providing a tool that, once deployed into a real-world application, allows to ease the management and understanding of the entire dialog workflow between users, physicians, and systems. We integrated Convology into a living laboratory concerning the adoption of conversational agents for supporting the self-management of patients affected by asthma. Observer results demonstrated the feasibility of investigating this research direction.