How do physiotherapists and patients talk? Developing the RiMotivAzione dialogue corpus

The research project RiMotivAzione aims at helping post-stroke patients who are following an arm and hand rehabilitation path. In this paper we present the RiMotivAzione corpus, the first collection of dialogues between physiotherapists and patients recorded in an Italian hospital and annotated following the RIAS annotation protocol. We describe the dataset, the methodologies applied and our first investigations on relevant features of the dialogue process. The corpus was the basis for the design of a conversational interface integrated with a wearable device for rehabilitation, to be used by the patient during the exercises that he or she may perform independently.