Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue system with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）
Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health interve…
Structured Dialogue System for Mental Health: An LLM Chatbot Leveraging the PM+ Guidelines
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Wuhan Research Institute of Posts and Telecommunications（武汉邮电科学研究院）
Mental health counseling remains a major challenge in modern society due to cost, stigma, fear, and unavailability. We posit that generative artificial intelligence (AI) models designed for mental health counseling could help improve outcomes by lowering barriers to access. To this end, we have developed a deep learning (DL) dialogue system called Serena. The system consists of a core generative model and post-processing algorithms. The core generative model is a 2.7 billion parameter Seq2Seq Transformer fine-tuned on thousands of transcripts of person-centered-therapy (PCT) sessions. The seri…
SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Support
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西lake大学工程学院）；Research Center for Industries of the Future, Westlake University（西lake大学未来产业研究中心）
Building Extractive Question Answering System to Support Human-AI Health Coaching Model for Sleep Domain
Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, NTU（南洋理工大学李光前医学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, NTU（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Salesforce AI Research（赛富时人工智能研究院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
An Offline Mobile Conversational Agent for Mental Health Support: Learning from Emotional Dialogues and Psychological Texts with Student-Centered Evaluation
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal（电子工程与计算机科学系，比哈尔印度科学教育与研究中心）
BITS Pilani（比尔拉理工学院）；Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology（马哈拉贾·阿格拉森理工学院）；IIIT-Delhi（德里印度信息技术学院）
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the mental health of people under risk. Social counselling has gained remarkable significance in this environment. Unlike general goal-oriented dialogues, a conversation between a patient and a therapist is considerably implicit, though the objective of the conversation is quite apparent. In such a case, understanding the intent of the patient is imperative in providing effective counselling in therapy sessions, and the same applies to a dialogue system as well. In this work, we take forward a small but an important step in the development of an a…
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in the right direction. The conversational agent must therefore be empathetic and able to conduct free-flowing conversations. To this effect, we present an approach for creating a generative empathetic open-domain chatbot that can be used for mental health applications. We leverage large scale pre-training and empathetic conversational data to make the responses …
Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build two large-scale medical dialogue datasets: MedDialog-EN and MedDialog-CN. MedDialog-EN is an English dataset containing 0.3 million conversations between patients and doctors and 0.5 million utterances. MedDialog-CN is an Chinese dataset containing 1.1 million conversations and 4 million utterances. To our best knowledge, MedDialog-(EN,CN) are…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
We present VOnDA, a framework to implement the dialogue management functionality in dialogue systems. Although domain-independent, VOnDA is tailored towards dialogue systems with a focus on social communication, which implies the need of long-term memory and high user adaptivity. For these systems, which are used in health environments or elderly care, margin of error is very low and control over the dialogue process is of topmost importance. The same holds for commercial applications, where customer trust is at risk. VOnDA's specification and memory layer relies upon (extended) RDF/OWL, which…
State-of-the-art neural dialogue systems excel at syntactic and semantic modelling of language, but often have a hard time establishing emotional alignment with the human interactant during a conversation. In this work, we bring Affect Control Theory (ACT), a socio-mathematical model of emotions for human-human interactions, to the neural dialogue generation setting. ACT makes predictions about how humans respond to emotional stimuli in social situations. Due to this property, ACT and its derivative probabilistic models have been successfully deployed in several applications of Human-Computer …
A medical dialogue system is essential for healthcare service as providing primary clinical advice and diagnoses. It has been gradually adopted and practiced in medical organizations in the form of a conversational bot, largely due to the advancement of NLP. In recent years, the introduction of state-of-the-art deep learning models and transfer learning techniques like Universal Language Model Fine Tuning (ULMFiT) and Knowledge Distillation (KD) largely contributes to the performance of NLP tasks. However, some deep neural networks are poorly calibrated and wrongly estimate the uncertainty. He…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；SoftBank Robotics Europe（软银机器人欧洲公司）
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational skills. If the person is impatient, the person might want a robot to navigate faster and vice versa. Linguistic features that indicate politeness can provide social cues about a person's patient and impatient behaviour. The novelty presented in this paper is to dynamically incorporate politeness in robotic dialogue systems for navigation. Understanding the polit…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；CM Insight；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
In recent years, we have seen deep learning and distributed representations of words and sentences make impact on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as similarity, entailment and sentiment analysis. Here we introduce a new task: understanding of mental health concepts derived from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). We define a mental health ontology based on the CBT principles, annotate a large corpus where this phenomena is exhibited and perform understanding using deep learning and distributed representations. Our results show that the performance of deep learning models c…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Tencent Jarvis Lab（腾讯天衍实验室）
Developing conversational agents to interact with patients and provide primary clinical advice has attracted increasing attention due to its huge application potential, especially in the time of COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the training of end-to-end neural-based medical dialogue system is restricted by an insufficient quantity of medical dialogue corpus. In this work, we make the first attempt to build and release a large-scale high-quality Medical Dialogue dataset related to 12 types of common Gastrointestinal diseases named MedDG, with more than 17K conversations collected from the online he…
Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Previous researches on dialogue system assessment usually focus on the quality evaluation (e.g. fluency, relevance, etc) of responses generated by the chatbots, which are local and technical metrics. For a chatbot which responds to millions of online users including minors, we argue that it should have a healthy mental tendency in order to avoid the negative psychological impact on them. In this paper, we establish several mental health assessment dimensions for chatbots (depression, anxiety, alcohol addiction, empathy) and introduce the questionnaire-based mental health assessment methods. We…
Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California（南加州大学创意技术研究所）
In this study we collect and annotate human-human role-play dialogues in the domain of weight management. There are two roles in the conversation: the "seeker" who is looking for ways to lose weight and the "helper" who provides suggestions to help the "seeker" in their weight loss journey. The chat dialogues collected are then annotated with a novel annotation scheme inspired by a popular health behavior change theory called "trans-theoretical model of health behavior change". We also build classifiers to automatically predict the annotation labels used in our corpus. We find that classificat…
Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) have become a prevalent method for receiving mental health counseling in the digital healthcare space. An assistive counseling conversation commences with natural open-ended topics to familiarize the client with the environment and later converges into more fine-grained domain-specific topics. Unlike other conversational systems, which are categorized as open-domain or task-oriented systems, VMHAs possess a hybrid conversational flow. These counseling bots need to comprehend various aspects of the conversation, such as dialogue-acts, intents, etc., to e…
Good communication is critical to good healthcare. Clinical dialogue is a conversation between health practitioners and their patients, with the explicit goal of obtaining and sharing medical information. This information contributes to medical decision-making regarding the patient and plays a crucial role in their healthcare journey. The reliance on note taking and manual scribing processes are extremely inefficient and leads to manual transcription errors when digitizing notes. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) plays a significant role in speech-to-text applications, and can be directly use…
Empathy by Design: Aligning Large Language Models for Healthcare Dialogue
Department of Public Health Sciences, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA（公共卫生科学系，德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）；Department of Nursing, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA（护理系，德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）；Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA（康复科学系，德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Changi General Hospital（樟宜综合医院）
Data for human-human spoken dialogues for research and development are currently very limited in quantity, variety, and sources; such data are even scarcer in healthcare. In this work, we investigate fast prototyping of a dialogue comprehension system by leveraging on minimal nurse-to-patient conversations. We propose a framework inspired by nurse-initiated clinical symptom monitoring conversations to construct a simulated human-human dialogue dataset, embodying linguistic characteristics of spoken interactions like thinking aloud, self-contradiction, and topic drift. We then adopt an establis…
