Jos T.P. Dobber


2024

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Eliciting Motivational Interviewing Skill Codes in Psychotherapy with LLMs: A Bilingual Dataset and Analytical Study
Xin Sun | Jiahuan Pei | Jan de Wit | Mohammad Aliannejadi | Emiel Krahmer | Jos T.P. Dobber | Jos A. Bosch
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Behavioral coding (BC) in motivational interviewing (MI) holds great potential for enhancing the efficacy of MI counseling. However, manual coding is labor-intensive, and automation efforts are hindered by the lack of data due to the privacy of psychotherapy. To address these challenges, we introduce BiMISC, a bilingual dataset of MI conversations in English and Dutch, sourced from real counseling sessions. Expert annotations in BiMISC adhere strictly to the motivational interviewing skills code (MISC) scheme, offering a pivotal resource for MI research. Additionally, we present a novel approach to elicit the MISC expertise from Large language models (LLMs) for MI coding. Through the in-depth analysis of BiMISC and the evaluation of our proposed approach, we demonstrate that the LLM-based approach yields results closely aligned with expert annotations and maintains consistent performance across different languages. Our contributions not only furnish the MI community with a valuable bilingual dataset but also spotlight the potential of LLMs in MI coding, laying the foundation for future MI research.