Unwholesome lifestyles can reduce lifespan by several years or even decades. Therefore, raising awareness and promoting healthier behaviors prove essential to revert this dramatic panorama. Virtual coaching systems are at the forefront of digital solutions to educate people and procure a more effective health self-management. Despite their increasing popularity, virtual coaching systems are still regarded as entertainment applications with an arguable efficacy for changing behaviors, since messages can be perceived to be boring, unpersonalized and can become repetitive over time. In fact, messages tend to be quite general, repetitive and rarely tailored to the specific needs, preferences and conditions of each user. In the light of these limitations, this work aims at help building a new generation of methods for automatically generating user-tailored motivational messages. While the creation of messages is addressed in a previous work, in this paper the authors rather present a method to automatically extract the semantics of motivational messages and to create the ontological representation of these messages. The method uses first natural language processing to perform a linguistic analysis of the message. The extracted information is then mapped to the concepts of the motivational messages ontology. The proposed method could boost the quantity and diversity of messages by automat- ically mining and parsing existing messages from the internet or other digitised sources, which can be later tailored according to the specific needs and particularities of each user.

1. AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF
MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES INTO
ONTOLOGICAL ENTITIES FOR SMART
COACHING APPLICATIONS
C. VILLALONGA(*), H. OP DEN AKKER, H. HERMENS, L.J. HERRERA, H. POMARES, I. ROJAS,
O. VALENZUELA, O. BANOS
(*) claudia.villalonga@unir.net

2. 23/3/18 2
E-COACHING
WHY IS IT THAT CHALLENGING?
 Major efforts have been mainly targeted
at improving the quantification part
(oversimplification vs exaggeration)
 “Generic” motivational messages (one-
size-does-not-fit-all)
 Shallow recommendations (explanation
of goals, how to reach them,
implications, etc.)
 We are still learning…

3. 23/3/18 3
MOTIVATIONAL MESSAGES FOR E-COACHING
MAIN CHALLENGES
 Represent the principal, and perhaps more natural,
means for translating behavioral findings into easy-to-
follow and realizable recommendations (actions)
 KEY challenges:
 Generation of relevant messages tailored to the
performance, needs and characteristics of each
specific user [Noar2007]
 Fostering the diversity of the messages to
increase adherence and make the coaching system
more realistic and trustworthy [opdenAkker2015]
Noar et al. Does tailoring matter? Meta-analytic review of tailored print health behavior change interventions. Psychological bulletin 133, 4 (2007),
673.
op den Akker et al.Tailored motivational message generation: A model and practical framework for real-time physical activity coaching. Journal of
Biomedical Informatics 55 (2015), 104-115.

4. 23/3/18 4
FRAMEWORK OF MOTIVATIONAL MESSAGES
PROPOSED SOLUTION

5. 23/3/18 5
FRAMEWORK OF MOTIVATIONAL MESSAGES
MOTIVATIONAL MESSAGE ONTOLOGY
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”

6. 23/3/18 6
FRAMEWORK OF MOTIVATIONAL MESSAGES
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”
Automatic Mapping

7. 23/3/18 7
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”
predicatesubject
Part of
Speech
pronoun
verb
verb
article
article
article
noun
noun
noun
adverb
preposition
preposition
Grammatical
Structure
object modifiermodifier

8. 23/3/18 8
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”
predicatesubject
pronoun
verb
verb
article
article
article
noun
noun
noun
adverb
preposition
preposition
object modifiermodifier
ACTION LOCATION TIMEELEMENT

9. 23/3/18 9
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION
ACTION PLACE TIMEELEMENT
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”

10. 23/3/18 10
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION
“You should walk the dog to the park early in the morning”
TIME
ACTION
ELEMENT
PLACE

11. 23/3/18 11
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
MESSAGE SPLITTING
“Walk or run to the park!”
“Walk to the park!” “Run to the park!”

12. 23/3/18 12
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
MESSAGE INFERENCE
“Why don’t you go to the gym and practice some exercise?”
“Why don’t you go to the park and practice some exercise?”
Ontology reasoning

13. 23/3/18 13
AUTOMATIC MAPPING OF MOTIVATIONAL TEXT MESSAGES
IMPLEMENTATION
 Java Implementation
 Stanford CoreNLP
 Apache Jena (v2.11.2)

14. 23/3/18 14
CONCLUSIONS
This work contributes with:
 A new approach for automatically extracting the semantics of motivational
messages and creating the ontological representation of these messages
Future work:
 Evaluation of the message mapping method
 Improvement of the method to infer new messages based on the
knowledge modeled in the ontology
 Extension of the motivational message ontology to include more concepts
by linking available ontologies and thesaurus
 Implementation of the message retrieval method to have a fully functional
framework for the automatic generation of tailored coaching messages

15. 23/3/18 15
Thank you!
Questions?
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under grant agreement No 769553.