# MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Discourse-Aware Neural Extractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14142/) (2019)
- [APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08207/) (2022)
- [On Robustness and Bias Analysis of BERT-based Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06206/) (2020)
- [Modeling Language Usage and Listener Engagement in Podcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06605/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [An Active Learning Framework for Inclusive Generation by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13641/) (2024)
- [Sleepless Nights, Sugary Days: Creating Synthetic Users with Health Conditions for Realistic Coaching Agent Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13135/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Nursing and Elderly Care with Large Language Models: An AI-Driven Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09946/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Patients who effectively manage their symptoms often demonstrate higher levels of engagement in conversations and interventions with healthcare practitioners. This engagement is multifaceted, encompassing cognitive and socio-affective dimensions. Consequently, it is crucial for AI systems to understand the engagement in natural conversations between patients and practitioners to better contribute toward patient care. In this paper, we present a novel dataset (MedNgage), which consists of patient-nurse conversations about cancer symptom management. We manually annotate the dataset with a novel framework of categories of patient engagement from two different angles, namely: i) socio-affective (3.1K spans), and ii) cognitive use of language (1.8K spans). Through statistical analysis of the data that is annotated using our framework, we show a positive correlation between patient symptom management outcomes and their engagement in conversations. Additionally, we demonstrate that pre-trained transformer models fine-tuned on our dataset can reliably predict engagement classes in patient-nurse conversations. Lastly, we use LIME (Ribeiro et al., 2016) to analyze the underlying challenges of the tasks that state-of-the-art transformer models encounter. The de-identified data is available for research purposes upon request.