Related papers: Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simu…

The development of AI for mental health is hindered by a lack of authentic therapy dialogues, due to strict privacy regulations and the fact that clinical sessions were historically rarely recorded. We present an LLM-driven pipeline that…

Operators performing high-stakes, safety-critical tasks - such as air traffic controllers, surgeons, or mission control personnel - must maintain exceptional cognitive performance under variable and often stressful conditions. This paper…

Massage therapy training emphasizes hands-on techniques and effective therapist--patient communication. However, many educational programs struggle to provide realistic practice scenarios. To address this problem, we propose TheraQuest, a…

This study explores the use of AI-based feedback to enhance the counselling competence of prospective teachers. An iterative block seminar was designed, incorporating theoretical foundations, practical applications, and AI tools for…

Empathetic dialogue is an indispensable part of building harmonious social relationships and contributes to the development of a helpful AI. Previous approaches are mainly based on fine small-scale language models. With the advent of…

This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients…

Mental health care poses an increasingly serious challenge to modern societies. In this context, there has been a surge in research that utilizes information technologies to address mental health problems, including those aiming to develop…

Clinical communication skills are essential for preparing healthcare professionals to provide equitable care across cultures. However, traditional training with simulated patients can be resource intensive and difficult to scale, especially…

Training dialog policies for speech-based virtual assistants requires a plethora of conversational data. The data collection phase is often expensive and time consuming due to human involvement. To address this issue, a common solution is…

Background: Motivational interviewing (MI) is an effective counseling approach for promoting health behavior change, but its impact is constrained by the need for highly trained human counselors. Objective: This study aimed to explore a…

Emotions play a central role in human communication, shaping trust, engagement, and social interaction. As artificial intelligence systems powered by large language models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, enabling them to…

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) aims to identify and restructure automatic negative thoughts pertaining to involuntary interpretations of events, yet existing counseling agents struggle to identify and address them in dialogue settings.…

Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance within a bounded number of turns. Yet post-trained LLMs are…

Self-guided mental health interventions, such as "do-it-yourself" tools to learn and practice coping strategies, show great promise to improve access to mental health care. However, these interventions are often cognitively demanding and…

Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…

Effective communication between a clinician and their patient is critical for delivering healthcare maximizing outcomes. Unfortunately, traditional communication training approaches that use human standardized patients and expert coaches…

Empathy is critical for effective and satisfactory conversational communication. Prior efforts to measure conversational empathy mostly focus on expressed communicative intents -- that is, the way empathy is expressed. Yet, these works…

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to provide empathetic and effective emotional assistance through dialogue, addressing the growing demand for mental health support. This paper presents our solution for the NLPCC 2025 Task 8 ESC…

Simulations constitute a fundamental component of medical and nursing education and traditionally employ standardized patients (SP) and high-fidelity manikins to develop clinical reasoning and communication skills. However, these methods…

Modern machine learning models are opaque, and as a result there is a burgeoning academic subfield on methods that explain these models' behavior. However, what is the precise goal of providing such explanations, and how can we demonstrate…