Larry An


2023

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Empathy Identification Systems are not Accurately Accounting for Context
Andrew Lee | Jonathan Kummerfeld | Larry An | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Understanding empathy in text dialogue data is a difficult, yet critical, skill for effective human-machine interaction. In this work, we ask whether systems are making meaningful progress on this challenge. We consider a simple model that checks if an input utterance is similar to a small set of empathetic examples. Crucially, the model does not look at what the utterance is a response to, i.e., the dialogue context. This model performs comparably to other work on standard benchmarks and even outperforms state-of-the-art models for empathetic rationale extraction by 16.7 points on T-F1 and 4.3 on IOU-F1. This indicates that current systems rely on the surface form of the response, rather than whether it is suitable in context. To confirm this, we create examples with dialogue contexts that change the interpretation of the response and show that current systems continue to label utterances as empathetic. We discuss the implications of our findings, including improvements for empathetic benchmarks and how our model can be an informative baseline.

2021

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Micromodels for Efficient, Explainable, and Reusable Systems: A Case Study on Mental Health
Andrew Lee | Jonathan K. Kummerfeld | Larry An | Rada Mihalcea
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Many statistical models have high accuracy on test benchmarks, but are not explainable, struggle in low-resource scenarios, cannot be reused for multiple tasks, and cannot easily integrate domain expertise. These factors limit their use, particularly in settings such as mental health, where it is difficult to annotate datasets and model outputs have significant impact. We introduce a micromodel architecture to address these challenges. Our approach allows researchers to build interpretable representations that embed domain knowledge and provide explanations throughout the model’s decision process. We demonstrate the idea on multiple mental health tasks: depression classification, PTSD classification, and suicidal risk assessment. Our systems consistently produce strong results, even in low-resource scenarios, and are more interpretable than alternative methods.

2020

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Expressive Interviewing: A Conversational System for Coping with COVID-19
Charles Welch | Allison Lahnala | Veronica Perez-Rosas | Siqi Shen | Sarah Seraj | Larry An | Kenneth Resnicow | James Pennebaker | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns for many regarding personal and public health implications, financial security and economic stability. Alongside many other unprecedented challenges, there are increasing concerns over social isolation and mental health. We introduce Expressive Interviewing – an interview-style conversational system that draws on ideas from motivational interviewing and expressive writing. Expressive Interviewing seeks to encourage users to express their thoughts and feelings through writing by asking them questions about how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. We present relevant aspects of the system’s design and implementation as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses of user interactions with the system. In addition, we conduct a comparative evaluation with a general purpose dialogue system for mental health that shows our system potential in helping users to cope with COVID-19 issues.

2019

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Towards Extracting Medical Family History from Natural Language Interactions: A New Dataset and Baselines
Mahmoud Azab | Stephane Dadian | Vivi Nastase | Larry An | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We introduce a new dataset consisting of natural language interactions annotated with medical family histories, obtained during interactions with a genetic counselor and through crowdsourcing, following a questionnaire created by experts in the domain. We describe the data collection process and the annotations performed by medical professionals, including illness and personal attributes (name, age, gender, family relationships) for the patient and their family members. An initial system that performs argument identification and relation extraction shows promising results – average F-score of 0.87 on complex sentences on the targeted relations.