arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Beyond Reflection: Affirmation as a Promising Behavioral Marker Associated with Quality in Text-Based Counseling

The paper investigates which counselor behaviors correlate with higher dialogue quality in AI-assisted text-based counseling. Using the KokoroChat dataset, the authors find that the strategy of affirmation consistently associates with better session quality, more so than reflection. Cross-dataset experiments suggest this signal also appears, to some extent, in an English dataset of non-expert supporters.

By Michimasa Inaba
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Graph2Counsel: Clinically Grounded Synthetic Counseling Dialogue Generation from Client Psychological Graphs

Graph2Counsel is a framework that generates synthetic counseling dialogues by leveraging Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) to encode the relationships among a client’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The system uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and explores techniques such as Chain‑of‑Thought and Multi‑Agent Feedback to produce 760 realistic sessions from 76 CPGs. Expert evaluation shows the dataset surpasses previous ones in specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety, and fine‑tuning an open‑source model on it improves performance on several counseling benchmarks.

By Aishik Mandal, Hiba Arnaout, Clarissa W. Ong, Juliet Bockhorst, Kate Sheehan, Rachael Moldow, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych