Dialogue systems for mental health care aim to provide appropriate support to individuals experiencing mental distress. While extensive research has been conducted to deliver adequate emotional support, existing studies cannot identify individuals who require professional medical intervention and cannot offer suitable guidance. We introduce the Diagnostic Emotional Support Conversation task for an advanced mental health management system. We develop the DESC dataset to assess depression symptoms while maintaining user experience by utilizing task-specific utterance generation prompts and a strict filtering algorithm. Evaluations by professional psychological counselors indicate that DESC has a superior ability to diagnose depression than existing data. Additionally, conversational quality evaluation reveals that DESC maintains fluent, consistent, and coherent dialogues.
DS@GT at eRisk 2025: From prompts to predictions, benchmarking early depression detection with conversational agent based assessments and temporal attention models
PRHLT research center, Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学PRHLT研究中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学数学与计算机科学学院）；CIIRC, Czech Technical University（捷克技术大学捷克信息学、机器人与控制论研究所）
The high prevalence of depression in society has given rise to the need for new digital tools to assist in its early detection. To this end, existing research has mainly focused on detecting depression in the domain of social media, where there is a sufficient amount of data. However, with the rise of conversational agents like Siri or Alexa, the conversational domain is becoming more critical. Unfortunately, there is a lack of data in the conversational domain. We perform a study focusing on domain adaptation from social media to the conversational domain. Our approach mainly exploits the lin…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute（清华-伯克利深圳学院）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We con…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Mental Health Center（上海市精神卫生中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）
In a depression-diagnosis-directed clinical session, doctors initiate a conversation with ample emotional support that guides the patients to expose their symptoms based on clinical diagnosis criteria. Such a dialogue system is distinguished from existing single-purpose human-machine dialog systems, as it combines task-oriented and chit-chats with uniqueness in dialogue topics and procedures. However, due to the social stigma associated with mental illness, the dialogue data related to depression consultation and diagnosis are rarely disclosed. Based on clinical depression diagnostic criteria …
Most depression assessment tools are based on self-report questionnaires, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). These psychometric instruments can be easily adapted to an online setting by means of electronic forms. However, this approach lacks the interacting and engaging features of modern digital environments. With the aim of making depression screening more available, attractive and effective, we developed Perla, a conversational agent able to perform an interview based on the PHQ-9. We also conducted a validation study in which we compared the results obtained by the tradition…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Emotional language generation is one of the keys to human-like artificial intelligence. Humans use different type of emotions depending on the situation of the conversation. Emotions also play an important role in mediating the engagement level with conversational partners. However, current conversational agents do not effectively account for emotional content in the language generation process. To address this problem, we develop a language modeling approach that generates affective content when the dialogue is situated in a given context. We use the recently released Empathetic-Dialogues cor…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM) that can generate appropriate responses not only in content (relevant and grammatical) but also in emotion (emotionally consistent). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the emotion factor in large-scale conversation generation. ECM addresses the factor using three new mechanisms that respectively (1) mod…
Efficient discovery of a speaker's emotional states in a multi-party conversation is significant to design human-like conversational agents. During a conversation, the cognitive state of a speaker often alters due to certain past utterances, which may lead to a flip in their emotional state. Therefore, discovering the reasons (triggers) behind the speaker's emotion-flip during a conversation is essential to explain the emotion labels of individual utterances. In this paper, along with addressing the task of emotion recognition in conversations (ERC), we introduce a novel task - Emotion-Flip Re…
Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations: A Survey of Methods, Trends, Challenges and Prospects
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials（广东省量子工程与量子材料重点实验室）；School of Electronic Science and Engineering (School of Microelectronics), South China Normal University（华南师范大学电子科学学院（微电子学院））；North Carolina Central University（北卡罗来纳中央大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；LMU Munich & Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑大学及慕尼黑机器学习中心）
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）
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 …
AI in Mental Health: Emotional and Sentiment Analysis of Large Language Models' Responses to Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Queries
University of Tehran（塔里斯坦大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；University of West London（西伦敦大学）；Azad University（阿扎德大学）；Amirkabir University of Technology（阿米卡比尔技术大学）
Investigating Acoustic-Textual Emotional Inconsistency Information for Automatic Depression Detection
Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory of Human-Machine Intelligence-Synergy Systems, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院粤港澳人机协同智能系统联合实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Good Mood Health Industry Group Co., Ltd（好心情健康产业集团有限公司）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Emotional support conversation aims at reducing the emotional distress of the help-seeker, which is a new and challenging task. It requires the system to explore the cause of help-seeker's emotional distress and understand their psychological intention to provide supportive responses. However, existing methods mainly focus on the sequential contextual information, ignoring the hierarchical relationships with the global cause and local psychological intention behind conversations, thus leads to a weak ability of emotional support. In this paper, we propose a Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph N…
The successful emotional conversation system depends on sufficient perception and appropriate expression of emotions. In a real-life conversation, humans firstly instinctively perceive emotions from multi-source information, including the emotion flow hidden in dialogue history, facial expressions, audio, and personalities of speakers. Then, they convey suitable emotions according to their personalities, but these multiple types of information are insufficiently exploited in emotional conversation fields. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a heterogeneous graph-based model for em…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Xiaomi AI Lab（小米人工智能实验室）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）
Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation -- which provides valuable assistance to people who are in need -- has two major limitations: (a) they generally employ a conversation-level emotion label, which is too coarse-grained to capture user's instant mental state; (b) most of them focus on expressing empathy in the response(s) rather than gradually reducing user's distress. To address the problems, we propose a novel model \textbf{MISC}, which firstly infers the user's fine-grained emotional status, and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. Experimental resul…
The Expressions of Depression and Anxiety in Chinese Psycho-counseling: Usage of First-person Singular Pronoun and Negative Emotional Words
Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Hangzhou Polytechnic（杭州职业技术学院）
Emotions play a critical role in our everyday lives by altering how we perceive, process and respond to our environment. Affective computing aims to instill in computers the ability to detect and act on the emotions of human actors. A core aspect of any affective computing system is the classification of a user's emotion. In this study we present a novel methodology for classifying emotion in a conversation. At the backbone of our proposed methodology is a pre-trained Language Model (LM), which is supplemented by a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) that propagates information over the predicat…
Conversations contain a wide spectrum of multimodal information that gives us hints about the emotions and moods of the speaker. In this paper, we developed a system that supports humans to analyze conversations. Our main contribution is the identification of appropriate multimodal features and the integration of such features into verbatim conversation transcripts. We demonstrate the ability of our system to take in a wide range of multimodal information and automatically generated a prediction score for the depression state of the individual. Our experiments showed that this approach yielded…
PRCCF: A Persona-guided Retrieval and Causal-aware Cognitive Filtering Framework for Emotional Support Conversation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China（东北大学计算机科学与工程学院，沈阳，辽宁，中国）；Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle, Santa Clara, CA, United States（甲骨文云基础设施，甲骨文公司，圣克拉拉，加利福尼亚州，美国）
College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University（信息科学与工程学院，立命馆大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（计算机科学与技术学院，浙江大学）
Central University of Kashmir（克什米尔中央大学）；IIT Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；University of Kashmir（克什米尔大学）
Textual emotional intelligence is playing a ubiquitously important role in leveraging human emotions on social media platforms. Social media platforms are privileged with emotional content and are leveraged for various purposes like opinion mining, emotion mining, and sentiment analysis. This data analysis is also levered for the prevention of online bullying, suicide prevention, and depression detection among social media users. In this article, we have designed an automatic depression detection of online social media users by analyzing their social media behavior. The designed depression det…
EmotionIC: emotional inertia and contagion-driven dependency modeling for emotion recognition in conversation
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能研究院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Systems, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学湖北省类脑智能系统重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Ministry of Education（华中科技大学图像信息处理与智能控制教育部重点实验室）
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Kingsoft Institute of Artificial Intelligence（金山人工智能研究院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
In recent years, the generation of conversation content based on deep neural networks has attracted many researchers. However, traditional neural language models tend to generate general replies, lacking logical and emotional factors. This paper proposes a conversation content generation model that combines reinforcement learning with emotional editing constraints to generate more meaningful and customizable emotional replies. The model divides the replies into three clauses based on pre-generated keywords and uses the emotional editor to further optimize the final reply. The model combines mu…
Cognitive Policy-Driven LLM for Diagnosis and Intervention of Cognitive Distortions in Emotional Support Conversation
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；City University of Macau, Macao SAR, China（澳门城市大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China（鹏城实验室）
Mitigating Strategy Preference Bias in Emotional Support Conversation via Uncertainty Estimations
Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Education（上海人工智能教育研究院）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Psychology and Cognitive Science（心理学与认知科学学院）；School of Pharmacy（药学院）
Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversations
School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University（苏州大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing（阿里云Qwen团队）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Foviatech GmbH（Foviatech 有限公司）
Many socio-linguistic cues are used in the conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental social cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties useful in conversational analysis. This short article presents some of the brief findings of polite emotional dialogue acts, where we can correlate the relational bonds between these socio-linguistics cues. We found that the utterances with emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite while Happiness and Sadness to be polite. Similar phenomenon occurs with dialogue acts,…
Traditional neural language models tend to generate generic replies with poor logic and no emotion. In this paper, a syntactically constrained bidirectional-asynchronous approach for emotional conversation generation (E-SCBA) is proposed to address this issue. In our model, pre-generated emotion keywords and topic keywords are asynchronously introduced into the process of decoding. It is much different from most existing methods which generate replies from the first word to the last. Through experiments, the results indicate that our approach not only improves the diversity of replies, but gai…
PingAn Life Insurance Company of China, Ltd.（中国平安人寿保险股份有限公司）；School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is essential for building empathetic human-machine systems. Existing studies on ERC primarily focus on summarizing the context information in a conversation, however, ignoring the differentiated emotional behaviors within and across different modalities. Designing appropriate strategies that fit the differentiated multi-modal emotional behaviors can produce more accurate emotional predictions. Thus, we propose the DialogueTransformer to explore the differentiated emotional behaviors from the intra- and inter-modal perspectives. For intra-modal, we con…
