Using linguistic analysis to characterize conceptual units of thought in spoken medical narratives

摘要

This study explores spoken medical narratives in which dermatologists were shown images of dermatological conditions and asked to explain their reasoning process while working toward a diagnosis. This corpus has been annotated by a domain expert for information-rich conceptual units of thought, providing opportunity for analysis of the link between diagnostic reasoning steps and speech features. We explore these annotations in regards to speech disfluencies, prosody, and type-token ratios, with the finding that speech tagged within thought units is unique from non-tagged speech in each of these aspects. Additionally, we discuss pattern differences in temporal thought unit distribution based on diagnostic correctness.