2023/05/26 by Dehua Tao, Tan Lee, Tao, Dehua +5
Medicine · Psychology · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Digital Mental Health Interventions #Empathy and Medical Education #FOS: Electrical engineering #Mental Health via Writing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.16690
openalex publication_date 2023/05/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Counseling is an activity of conversational speaking between a therapist and a client. Therapist empathy is an essential indicator of counseling quality and assessed subjectively by considering the entire conversation. This paper proposes to encode long counseling conversation using a hierarchical attention network. Conversations with extreme values of empathy rating are used to train a Siamese network based encoder with contrastive loss. Two-level attention mechanisms are applied to learn the importance weights of individual speaker turns and groups of turns in the conversation. Experimental results show that the use of contrastive loss is effective in encouraging the conversation encoder to learn discriminative embeddings that are related to therapist empathy. The distances between conversation embeddings positively correlate with the differences in the respective empathy scores. The learned conversation embeddings can be used to predict the subjective rating of therapist empathy.