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Related papers: Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simu…

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Effective persuasive dialogue agents adapt their strategies to individual users, accounting for the evolution of their psychological states and intentions throughout conversations. We present a personality-aware reinforcement learning…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Donghuo Zeng , Roberto Legaspi , Kazushi Ikeda

Simulations, although powerful in accurately replicating real-world systems, often remain inaccessible to non-technical users due to their complexity. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) provide intuitive, language-based interactions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Jacob Kleiman , Kevin Frank , Joseph Voyles , Sindy Campagna

Empathy is critical for effective mental health support, especially when addressing Long Counseling Texts (LCTs). However, existing Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate replies that are semantically fluent but lack the structured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Xianrong Yao , Dong She , Chenxu Zhang , Yimeng Zhang , Yueru Sun , Noman Ahmed , Yang Gao , Zhanpeng Jin

College counseling centers in various universities have been tasked with the important responsibility of attending to the mental health needs of their students. Owing to the unprecedented recent surge of demand for such services, college…

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed conversational agents, enabling complex human-machine interactions. However, evaluation frameworks often focus on single tasks, failing to capture the dynamic nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Pietro Alessandro Aluffi , Patrick Zietkiewicz , Marya Bazzi , Matt Arderne , Vladimirs Murevics

With the development of online business, customer service agents gradually play a crucial role as an interface between the companies and their customers. Most companies spend a lot of time and effort on hiring and training customer service…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Shuang Peng , Shuai Zhu , Minghui Yang , Haozhou Huang , Dan Liu , Zujie Wen , Xuelian Li , Biao Fan

Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jing Ye , Lu Xiang , Yaping Zhang , Chengqing Zong

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in the field of psychological counseling. However, when human therapists work with LLMs in therapy sessions, it is hard to understand how the model gives the answers. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Keqi Chen , Zekai Sun , Huijun Lian , Yingming Gao , Ya Li

Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion. Although…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Zhiyong Cao , Dunqiang Liu , Qi Dai , Haojun Xu , Huaiyan Xu , Huan He , Yafei Liu , Siyuan Liu , XiaoLin Lin , Ke Ma , Ruqian Shi , Sijia Yao , Hao Wang , Sicheng Zhou

Objectives: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to assist clinicians and support patients, no existing work has explored dialogue systems for standard diagnostic interviews and assessments. This study aims to bridge the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Sichang Tu , Abigail Powers , Stephen Doogan , Jinho D. Choi

Background: Traditional research on collaborative learning scaffolding is often time-consuming and resource-heavy, which hinders the rapid iteration and optimization of instructional strategies. LLM-based multi-agent systems have recently…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Han Wua , Lishan Zhang , Chunming Lu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Harsh Sakhrani , Saloni Parekh , Shubham Mahajan

User simulation has long played a vital role in computer science due to its potential to support a wide range of applications. Language, as the primary medium of human communication, forms the foundation of social interaction and behavior.…

Previous research has shown that humans are more receptive towards language models that that exhibit empathetic behavior. While empathy is essential for developing helpful dialogue agents, very few large corpora containing empathetic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Run Chen , Jun Shin , Julia Hirschberg

Psychotherapy or counseling is typically conducted through spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. Analyzing the speech characteristics of psychotherapeutic interactions can help understand the factors associated with…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 Dehua Tao , Harold Chui , Sarah Luk , Tan Lee

Reactions such as gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations are an abundant, naturally occurring channel of information that humans provide during interactions. A robot or other agent could leverage an understanding of such implicit…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Yuchen Cui , Qiping Zhang , Alessandro Allievi , Peter Stone , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox

Artificial agents capable of understanding and aligning with others' intentions are essential for safe and socially robust artificial intelligence. We introduce a computational framework for empathy in active inference agents, grounded in…

Empathetic Conversational Systems (ECS) are built to respond empathetically to the user's emotions and sentiments, regardless of the application domain. Current ECS studies evaluation approaches are restricted to offline evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar , Siyuan Brandon Loh

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various information-seeking and reasoning tasks. These computational systems drive state-of-the-art dialogue systems, such as ChatGPT and Bard. They also carry…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Siyuan Brandon Loh , Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar

This study presents a framework for conducting psychological and linguistic research through simulated conversations using large language models (LLMs). The proposed methodology offers significant advantages, particularly for simulating…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Frank Tian-fang Ye , Xiaozi Gao