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.

Categorizing patient’s intentions in conversational assessment can help decision making in clinical treatments. Many conversation corpora span broaden a series of time stages. However, it is not clear that how the themes shift in the conversation impact on the performance of human intention categorization (eg., patients might show different behaviors during the beginning versus the end). This paper proposes a method that models the temporal factor by using domain adaptation on clinical dialogue corpora, Motivational Interviewing (MI). We deploy Bi-LSTM and topic model jointly to learn language usage change across different time sessions. We conduct experiments on the MI corpora to show the promising improvement after considering temporality in the classification task.