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BackgroundThe potential of chatbots for screening and monitoring COVID-19 was envisioned since the outbreak of the disease. Chatbots can help disseminate up-to-date and trustworthy information, promote healthy social behavior, and support the provision of health care services safely and at scale. In this scenario and in view of its far-reaching postpandemic impact, it is important to evaluate user experience with this kind of application. ObjectiveWe aimed to evaluate the quality of user experience with a COVID-19 chatbot designed by a large telehealth service in Brazil, focusing on the usability of real users and the exploration of strengths and shortcomings of the chatbot, as revealed in reports by participants in simulated scenarios. MethodsWe examined a chatbot developed by a multidisciplinary team and used it as a component within the workflow of a local public health care service. The chatbot had 2 core functionalities: assisting web-based screening of COVID-19 symptom severity and providing evidence-based information to the population. From October 2020 to January 2021, we conducted a mixed methods approach and performed a 2-fold evaluation of user experience with our chatbot by following 2 methods: a posttask usability Likert-scale survey presented to all users after concluding their interaction with the bot and an interview with volunteer participants who engaged in a simulated interaction with the bot guided by the interviewer. ResultsUsability assessment with 63 users revealed very good scores for chatbot usefulness (4.57), likelihood of being recommended (4.48), ease of use (4.44), and user satisfaction (4.38). Interviews with 15 volunteers provided insights into the strengths and shortcomings of our bot. Comments on the positive aspects and problems reported by users were analyzed in terms of recurrent themes. We identified 6 positive aspects and 15 issues organized in 2 categories: usability of the chatbot and health support offered by it, the former referring to usability of the chatbot and how users can interact with it and the latter referring to the chatbot’s goal in supporting people during the pandemic through the screening process and education to users through informative content. We found 6 themes accounting for what people liked most about our chatbot and why they found it useful—3 themes pertaining to the usability domain and 3 themes regarding health support. Our findings also identified 15 types of problems producing a negative impact on users—10 of them related to the usability of the chatbot and 5 related to the health support it provides. ConclusionsOur results indicate that users had an overall positive experience with the chatbot and found the health support relevant. Nonetheless, qualitative evaluation of the chatbot indicated challenges and directions to be pursued in improving not only our COVID-19 chatbot but also health chatbots in general.

Resumo: Objetivo: Sob a perspectiva do trabalho de Pearson (1998) e utilizando as ferramentas da linguística de corpus disponíveis para o português brasileiro, a pesquisa apresentada neste artigo busca verificar em que medida a coextensividade entre termo técnico, grupo nominal e item lexical pode ser considerada válida para o português brasileiro. Método: Para a verificação desta coextensividade, um corpus de artigos acadêmicos sobre o domínio experiencial do autocuidado em Diabetes Mellitus foi compilado eletronicamente. Esse corpus foi inserido no software concordanciador AntConc (ANTHONY, 2019) e três palavras-chave foram extraídas com base no corpus de referência CALIBRA (FIGUEREDO; PAGANO; FERREGUETTI, 2014). O contexto de cada uma dessas palavras foi analisado por meio da ferramenta clusters/n-grams do AntConc, considerando os clusters/n-grams com o número mínimo de dez ocorrências. Resultados: A investigação desses clusters/n-grams formados à direita e à esquerda de cada uma das palavras-chave selecionadas mostrou que a coextensividade entre termo técnico, grupo nominal e item lexical nem sempre pode ser identificada, embora a utilização da ferramenta de cluster/n-grams pode ser considerada eficaz para buscar por itens lexicais que estão em coextensividade à ordem do grupo nominal, em razão da existência de pelo menos um grupo nominal em cada cluster/n-gram analisado. Conclusão: Ainda que os programas utilizados em Pearson (1998) não estejam totalmente difundidos para o português brasileiro, a abordagem sistêmico-funcional para o grupo nominal e para o item lexical em conjunto com as ferramentas do software concordanciador utilizado se mostraram eficientes para a análise proposta neste artigo. Palavras-chave: item lexical; grupo nominal; termo técnico; linguística de corpus; sistêmico-funcional; co-extensividade. Abstract: Objective: Drawing on Pearson (1998) and using corpus linguistics tools available for Brazilian Portuguese, we report on a study aimed at exploring to what extent the concepts of technical term, nominal group and lexical item are coextensive in Brazilian Portuguese. Method: A corpus of academic articles on the experiential domain of Diabetes Mellitus self-care was compiled and queried in AntConc, a concordancing software (ANTHONY, 2019). Using as a reference corpus CALIBRA (FIGUEREDO; PAGANO; FERREGUETTI, 2014), three keywords were extracted analysed with AntConc tool clusters/n-grams, considering clusters/n-grams with a minimum number of ten occurrences. Results: Analysis of clusters/n-grams to the right and left of each of the selected keywords showed that technical term, nominal group and lexical item cannot always coextensive. The use of cluster/n-grams tool can be considered effective to search for lexical items that are coextensive to the order of the nominal group, due to the existence of at least one nominal group in each cluster/n-gram analyzed. Conclusion: Although the programs used by Pearson (1998) are not fully available to Brazilian Portuguese, a systemic-functional approach to nominal group and lexical item together with the tools of the concordancing software used in this paper proved to be efficient for the analysis herein proposed. Keywords: lexical item; nominal group; technical term; corpus linguistics; systemic functional theory; coextensiveness.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing have created a demand for new and innovative solutions in healthcare systems worldwide. One of the strategies that have been implemented are chatbots, which can be helpful in providing reliable health information and preventing people from seeking assistance in healthcare centers and being unnecessarily exposed to the virus. In this context, although a high number of chatbots have been implemented worldwide, little has been discussed about the process and challenges in developing and implementing this technology. This paper reports on an action research, which designed a novel chatbot as a prompt response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chatbot is intended to be a first layer of interaction with the public, performing triage of patients and providing information about COVID-19 on a large scale and without human contact. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we reflected on the development process and discuss lessons learned and recommendations to support a multidisciplinary development and evolution process of the chatbot; and (ii) we identified some interactive and technological features that can be used as a reference framework for this kind of technology. These contributions can be useful to other researchers and multidisciplinary teams facing similar challenges.

This article presents and explores a methodology to analyze verbal and verbal-visual logico-semantic relations (LSRs) in picturebooks originally written in English and their translations into Brazilian Portuguese. Drawing on systemic-functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and on Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), verbal and visual text in picturebooks was annotated and analyzed according to the LSRs identified in them. Results showed differences between the type of LSRs that tend to occur most frequently in verbal-visual texts and in clause complexes: while Expansion_Extension is the most frequent verbal-visual LSR in both the source text and the translated text, Projection_Locution is the most frequent LSR in clause complexes, in the source and translated texts as well. The study contributes a proposal to categorize LSRs in verbal text and LSRs in visual and verbal text that proves to be fully operational for annotation purposes and text analysis.

Com base nas descrições funcionalistas da focalização, este artigo toma as estruturas de clivagem e pseudoclivagem do português brasileiro (PB) como a manifestação de sistemas gramaticais, e objetiva descrever os sistemas textuais que realizam os significados de focalização. O estudo baseou-se numa amostra de textos extraídos do corpus CALIBRA, um corpus monolíngue do português brasileiro compilado com base numa tipologia da língua no contexto de cultura. Os textos foram analisados segundo a manifestação estrutural, as relações funcionais entre as opções sistêmicas, e o significado gerado pela organização gramatical. A análise revelou dois sistemas textuais independentes responsáveis pela gramaticalização, PREDICAÇÃO para elementos oracionais e IDENTIFICAÇÃO para a oração inteira. A PREDICAÇÃO organiza significados ideacionais, interpessoais e textuais, dando proeminência à distribuição da informação. A IDENTIFICAÇÃO se constitui como uma operação de nominalização e equação, que ocorrem em ordens gramaticais diferentes. Esses resultados apontam para uma descaracterização da pseudoclivagem como uma construção única de focalização.