Conversational Bots for Psychotherapy: A Study of Generative Transformer Models Using Domain-specific Dialogues
Avisha Das, Salih Selek, Alia R. Warner, Xu Zuo, Yan Hu, Vipina Kuttichi Keloth, Jianfu Li, W. Jim Zheng, Hua Xu
Abstract
Conversational bots have become non-traditional methods for therapy among individuals suffering from psychological illnesses. Leveraging deep neural generative language models, we propose a deep trainable neural conversational model for therapy-oriented response generation. We leverage transfer learning methods during training on therapy and counseling based data from Reddit and AlexanderStreet. This was done to adapt existing generative models – GPT2 and DialoGPT – to the task of automated dialog generation. Through quantitative evaluation of the linguistic quality, we observe that the dialog generation model - DialoGPT (345M) with transfer learning on video data attains scores similar to a human response baseline. However, human evaluation of responses by conversational bots show mostly signs of generic advice or information sharing instead of therapeutic interaction.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.bionlp-1.27
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Dina Demner-Fushman, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Sophia Ananiadou, Junichi Tsujii
- Venue:
- BioNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 285–297
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.bionlp-1.27
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.bionlp-1.27
- Cite (ACL):
- Avisha Das, Salih Selek, Alia R. Warner, Xu Zuo, Yan Hu, Vipina Kuttichi Keloth, Jianfu Li, W. Jim Zheng, and Hua Xu. 2022. Conversational Bots for Psychotherapy: A Study of Generative Transformer Models Using Domain-specific Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing, pages 285–297, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conversational Bots for Psychotherapy: A Study of Generative Transformer Models Using Domain-specific Dialogues (Das et al., BioNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2022.bionlp-1.27.pdf
- Data
- WebText