European Association for Computational Linguistics 2026

Spencer Hazel, Adam Brandt and colleagues at Ufonia presented “Empathy as interactional accomplishment in clinical interactions with a conversational agent” at the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026), held at the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Rabat, Morocco. The paper, co-authored with Yajie Vera He, Ernest Lim, Jared Joselowitz and Zachary Ellis of Ufonia, has been published in the workshop proceedings.

The paper sets out a method for mapping clinician behaviours associated with empathy and affiliation onto specific design specifications for a conversational AI clinical assistant. This is a peer-reviewed publication stemming from the Innovate UK-funded Encoding Empathy project and is directly informing the next generation of Dora deployments. By treating empathy as an interactionally accomplished phenomenon rather than a surface property of language, the paper makes the case that conversation-analytic methods are essential to safe and acceptable clinical AI

Read the paper: Hazel, S., Brandt, A., He, Y. V., Lim, E., Joselowitz, J. and Ellis, Z. (2026). Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026), pp. 284–290. Link