Negotiation of Antibiotic Treatment in Medical Consultations: A Corpus Based Study

Doctor-patient conversation is considered a contributing factor to antibiotic overprescription. Some language practices have been identified as parent pressuring doctors for prescribing; other practices are considered as likely to engender parent resistance to non-antibiotic treatment recommendations. In social science studies, approaches such as conversation analysis have been applied to identify those language practices. Current research for dialogue systems offer an alternative approach. Past research proved that corpusbased approaches have been effectively used for research involving modeling dialogue acts and sequential relations. In this proposal, we propose a corpus-based study of doctor-patient conversations of antibiotic treatment negotiation in pediatric consultations. Based on findings from conversation analysis studies, we use a computational linguistic approach to assist annotating and modeling of doctor-patient language practices, and analyzing their influence on antibiotic over-prescribing.