Yirong Chen

Other people with similar names: Yi-Rong Chen


2025

pdf bib
PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling
Haojie Xie | Yirong Chen | Xiaofen Xing | Jingkai Lin | Xiangmin Xu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Currently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of psychological counseling. However, existing mental health LLMs overlook a critical issue where they do not consider the fact that different psychological counselors exhibit different personal styles, including linguistic style and therapy techniques, etc. As a result, these LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Compared to the time-consuming and costly approach of collecting a large number of real-world counseling cases to create a specific counselor’s digital twin, our framework offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. To construct PsyDT, we utilize dynamic one-shot learning by using GPT-4 to capture counselor’s unique counseling style, mainly focusing on linguistic style and therapy techniques. Subsequently, using existing single-turn long-text dialogues with client’s questions, GPT-4 is guided to synthesize multi-turn dialogues of specific counselor. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs on the synthetic dataset, PsyDTCorpus, to achieve the digital twin of psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Experimental results indicate that our proposed PsyDT framework can synthesize multi-turn dialogues that closely resemble real-world counseling cases and demonstrate better performance compared to other baselines, thereby show that our framework can effectively construct the digital twin of psychological counselor with a specific counseling style.

pdf bib
TreeRAG: Unleashing the Power of Hierarchical Storage for Enhanced Knowledge Retrieval in Long Documents
Wenyu Tao | Xiaofen Xing | Yirong Chen | Linyi Huang | Xiangmin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

When confronting long document information retrieval for Query-Focused Summarization(QFS), Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) frameworks struggle to retrieve all relevant knowledge points, and the chunking and retrieve strategies of existing frameworks may disrupt the connections between knowledge points and the integrity of the information. To address these issues, we propose TreeRAG, which employs Tree-Chunking for chunking and embedding in a tree-like structure , coupled with "root-to-leaves" and "leaf-to-root" retrieve strategy named Bidirectional Traversal Retrieval. This approach effectively preserves the hierarchical structure among knowledge points and significantly enhances the ability to retrieve while minimizing noise inference. Our experimental results on the Finance, Law, and Medical subsets of the Dragonball dataset demonstrate that TreeRAG achieves significant enhancements in both recall quality and precision compared to traditional and popular existing methods and achieves better performance to corresponding question-answering tasks, marking a new breakthrough in long document knowledge retrieval.

pdf bib
CATCH: A Novel Data Synthesis Framework for High Therapy Fidelity and Memory-Driven Planning Chain of Thought in AI Counseling
Mingyu Chen | Jingkai Lin | Zhaojie Chu | Xiaofen Xing | Yirong Chen | Xiangmin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Recently, advancements in AI counseling based on large language models have shown significant progress. However, existing studies employ a one-time generation approach to synthesize multi-turn dialogue samples, resulting in low therapy fidelity and failing to capture the decision-making rationale behind each response. In this work, we propose CATCH, a novel data synthesis framework designed to address these challenges. Specifically, to improve therapy fidelity, we introduce the Progressive Dialogue Synthesis strategy, which extracts goals, resources, and solutions from a client’s self-report, organizes them into structured outlines, and then incrementally generates stage-aligned counseling dialogues. To capture decision-making rationale behind each response, we propose the Memory-Driven Dynamic Planning thinking pattern that integrates memory enhancement, global planning, and strategy reasoning; a collaborative multi-agent optimizer then leverages MDP to attach explicit chain-of-thought to each dialogue turn. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that CATCH significantly enhances fidelity and logical coherence in AI counseling.

2022

pdf bib
Modeling Compositionality with Dependency Graph for Dialogue Generation
Xiaofeng Chen | Yirong Chen | Xiaofen Xing | Xiangmin Xu | Wenjing Han | Qianfeng Tie
Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (SUKI)

Because of the compositionality of natural language, syntactic structure which contains the information about the relationship between words is a key factor for semantic understanding. However, the widely adopted Transformer is hard to learn the syntactic structure effectively in dialogue generation tasks. To explicitly model the compositionaity of language in Transformer Block, we restrict the information flow between words by constructing directed dependency graph and propose Dependency Relation Attention (DRA). Experimental results demonstrate that DRA can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art models for dialogue generation.