A Question Answering Chatbot for Gastric Cancer Patients After Curative Gastrectomy: Development and Evaluation of...

Postoperative gastric cancer patients have many questions about managing their daily lives with various symptoms and discomfort. This study aimed to develop a knowledge-based question answering (QA) chatbot for their self-management and to evaluate the user experience and performance of the chatbot. To support the chatbot's natural language processing, we analyzed QA texts from an online self-help group, clinical guidelines, and refined frequently asked questions related to gastric cancer. We developed a named entity classification with seven superconcepts, 4544 subconcepts, and 1415 synonyms. We also developed a knowledge base by linking the users' classified question intents with the experts' answers and knowledge resources, including 677 question intents and scripts with standard QA pairs and similar question phrases. A chatbot called "GastricFAQ" was built, reflecting the question topics of the named entity classification and QA pairs of the knowledge base. User experience evaluation (N = 56) revealed the highest mean score for usefulness (4.41/5.00), with all other items rated 4.00 or higher, except desirability (3.85/5.00). The chatbot's accuracy, precision, recall, and F score ratings were 85.2%, 87.6%, 96.8%, and 92.0%, respectively, with immediate answers. GastricFAQ could be provided as one option to obtain immediate information with relatively high accuracy for postoperative gastric cancer patients.