Language Engineering And The Pathway To Healthcare: A User-Oriented View

This position paper looks critically at a number of aspects of current research into spoken language translation (SLT) in the medical domain. We first discuss the user profile for medical SLT, criticizing designs which assume that the doctor will necessarily need or want to control the technology. If patients are to be users on an equal standing, more attention must be paid to usability issues. We focus briefly on the issue of feedback in SLT systems, pointing out the difficulties of relying on text-based paraphrases. We consider the delicate issue of evaluating medical SLT systems, noting that some of the standard and much-used evaluation techniques for all aspects of the SLT chain might not be suitable for use with real users, even if they are role-playing. Finally, we discuss the idea that the “pathway to healthcare” involves much more than a face-to-face interview with a medical professional, and that different technologies including but not restricted to SLT will be appropriate along this pathway.