Doctor-patient transcribed corpus of 194 encounters now published

Of the 497 originally collected videotapes of doctor-patient encounters from Akershus University Hospital 2007-08, 194 are now transcribed and tagged by the Institute of Nordic and Linguistic Studies at the University of Oslo, thus forming the Lege-pasient-korpuset (Doctor-Patient Corpus). All information in the dialogues that could identify any of the speakers has been anonymised. The Regional Ethics Committee has accepted publication to make these dialogues available for researchers everywhere (though as they are in Norwegian, use outside of Scandinavia is hardly likely). By allowing this, Arnstein Finset, Pål Gulbrandsen, and Bård Fossli Jensen, the researchers behind the original study, hope to achieve that several research groups in Scandinavia will profit on their work. The only requirement is that they want to be informed about use of the corpus, and asked to participate in the research if the study subject requires medical or psychological expertise. The ultimate goal is to create more insight in how doctors and patients talk together, in order to improve the teaching of doctors. A news story about the corpus was published on the website for Norwegian research news today at forskning.no (in Norwegian).