Analysis of Behavior Classification in Motivational Interviewing

Leili Tavabi, Trang Tran, Kalin Stefanov, Brian Borsari, Joshua Woolley, Stefan Scherer, Mohammad Soleymani


Abstract
Analysis of client and therapist behavior in counseling sessions can provide helpful insights for assessing the quality of the session and consequently, the client’s behavioral outcome. In this paper, we study the automatic classification of standardized behavior codes (annotations) used for assessment of psychotherapy sessions in Motivational Interviewing (MI). We develop models and examine the classification of client behaviors throughout MI sessions, comparing the performance by models trained on large pretrained embeddings (RoBERTa) versus interpretable and expert-selected features (LIWC). Our best performing model using the pretrained RoBERTa embeddings beats the baseline model, achieving an F1 score of 0.66 in the subject-independent 3-class classification. Through statistical analysis on the classification results, we identify prominent LIWC features that may not have been captured by the model using pretrained embeddings. Although classification using LIWC features underperforms RoBERTa, our findings motivate the future direction of incorporating auxiliary tasks in the classification of MI codes.
Anthology ID:
2021.clpsych-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
110–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.clpsych-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.clpsych-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leili Tavabi, Trang Tran, Kalin Stefanov, Brian Borsari, Joshua Woolley, Stefan Scherer, and Mohammad Soleymani. 2021. Analysis of Behavior Classification in Motivational Interviewing. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, pages 110–115, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analysis of Behavior Classification in Motivational Interviewing (Tavabi et al., CLPsych 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.clpsych-1.13.pdf