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Abstract Background A huge amount of research is carried out nowadays in Artificial Intelligence to propose automated ways to analyse medical data with the aim to support doctors in delivering medical diagnoses. However, a main issue of these approaches is the lack of transparency and interpretability of the achieved results, making it hard to employ such methods for educational purposes. It is therefore necessary to develop new frameworks to enhance explainability in these solutions. Results In this paper, we present a novel full pipeline to generate automatically natural language explanations for medical diagnoses. The proposed solution starts from a clinical case description associated with a list of correct and incorrect diagnoses and, through the extraction of the relevant symptoms and findings, enriches the information contained in the description with verified medical knowledge from an ontology. Finally, the system returns a pattern-based explanation in natural language which elucidates why the correct (incorrect) diagnosis is the correct (incorrect) one. The main contribution of the paper is twofold: first, we propose two novel linguistic resources for the medical domain (i.e, a dataset of 314 clinical cases annotated with the medical entities from UMLS, and a database of biological boundaries for common findings), and second, a full Information Extraction pipeline to extract symptoms and findings from the clinical cases and match them with the terms in a medical ontology and to the biological boundaries. An extensive evaluation of the proposed approach shows the our method outperforms comparable approaches. Conclusions Our goal is to offer AI-assisted educational support framework to form clinical residents to formulate sound and exhaustive explanations for their diagnoses to patients.

Argumentation is a mechanism to support different forms of reasoning such as decision making and persuasion and always cast under the light of critical thinking. In the latest years, several computational approaches to argumentation have been proposed to detect conflicting information, take the best decision with respect to the available knowledge, and update our own beliefs when new information arrives. The common point of all these approaches is that they assume a purely rational behavior of the involved actors, be them humans or artificial agents. However, this is not the case as humans are proved to behave differently, mixing rational and emotional attitudes to guide their actions. Some works have claimed that there exists a strong connection between the argumentation process and the emotions felt by people involved in such process. We advocate a complementary, descriptive and experimental method, based on the collection of emotional data about the way human reasoners handle emotions during debate interactions. Across different debates, people’s argumentation in plain English is correlated with the emotions automatically detected from the participants, their engagement in the debate, and the mental workload required to debate. Results show several correlations among emotions, engagement and mental workload with respect to the argumentation elements. For instance, when two opposite opinions are conflicting, this is reflected in a negative way on the debaters’ emotions. Beside their theoretical value for validating and inspiring computational argumentation theory, these results have applied value for developing artificial agents meant to argue with human users or to assist users in the management of debates.