VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing

Do June Min, Veronica Perez-Rosas, Ken Resnicow, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract
Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.690
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10289–10302
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.690
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.690
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Do June Min, Veronica Perez-Rosas, Ken Resnicow, and Rada Mihalcea. 2023. VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 10289–10302, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing (Min et al., Findings 2023)
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