An ontology-powered dialogue engine for patient communication of vaccines

In this study, we introduce an ontology-driven software engine to provide dialogue interaction functionality for a conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling. Currently, the HPV vaccination rates are low that risks unprotected individuals at being infected with HPV, a virus that leads to life-threatening cancers. In addition, we developed a question answering subsystem to support the dialogue engine. In this paper, we discuss our design and development of an ontology-driven dialogue engine that uses the Patient Health Information Dialogue Ontology, an ontology that we previously developed, and a question answering subsystem based on various previous methods to supplement the dialogue engine’s interaction with the user. Our next step is to test the functional ability of the ontology-driven software components and deploy the engine in a live environment to be integrated with a speech interface.