Towards augmenting crisis counselor training by improving message retrieval

Orianna Demasi, Marti A. Hearst, Benjamin Recht


Abstract
A fundamental challenge when training counselors is presenting novices with the opportunity to practice counseling distressed individuals without exacerbating a situation. Rather than replacing human empathy with an automated counselor, we propose simulating an individual in crisis so that human counselors in training can practice crisis counseling in a low-risk environment. Towards this end, we collect a dataset of suicide prevention counselor role-play transcripts and make initial steps towards constructing a CRISISbot for humans to counsel while in training. In this data-constrained setting, we evaluate the potential for message retrieval to construct a coherent chat agent in light of recent advances with text embedding methods. Our results show that embeddings can considerably improve retrieval approaches to make them competitive with generative models. By coherently retrieving messages, we can help counselors practice chatting in a low-risk environment.
Anthology ID:
W19-3001
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Kate Niederhoffer, Kristy Hollingshead, Philip Resnik, Rebecca Resnik, Kate Loveys
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3001
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Orianna Demasi, Marti A. Hearst, and Benjamin Recht. 2019. Towards augmenting crisis counselor training by improving message retrieval. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, pages 1–11, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards augmenting crisis counselor training by improving message retrieval (Demasi et al., CLPsych 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3001.pdf