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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support and mental health-related interactions outside clinical settings, yet little is known about how people evaluate and relate to these systems in everyday use. We analyze…
The global mental health crisis is looming with a rapid increase in mental disorders, limited resources, and the social stigma of seeking treatment. As the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed significant advancements in…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
Written Multi-Party Conversations (WMPCs) are widely studied across disciplines, with social media as a primary data source due to their accessibility. However, these datasets raise privacy concerns and often reflect platform-specific…
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…
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Intelligent Virtual Agents acting as psychotherapists presents significant opportunities for expanding mental healthcare access. However, their deployment has also been linked to serious…
Spurred by recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), virtual assistants are poised to take a leap forward in terms of their dialogue capabilities. Yet a major bottleneck to achieving genuinely transformative task-oriented dialogue…
Mental health counseling remains a major challenge in modern society due to cost, stigma, fear, and unavailability. We posit that generative artificial intelligence (AI) models designed for mental health counseling could help improve…
Clinical Question Answering (QA) systems enable doctors to quickly access patient information from electronic health records (EHRs). However, training these systems requires significant annotated data, which is limited due to the expertise…
Despite strong performance in medical question-answering, the clinical adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically hampered by their opaque 'black-box' reasoning, limiting clinician trust. This challenge is compounded by the…
The future of conversational agents will provide users with personalized information responses. However, a significant challenge in developing models is the lack of large-scale dialogue datasets that span multiple sessions and reflect…
Research within sociotechnical domains, such as Software Engineering, fundamentally requires a thorough consideration of the human perspective. However, traditional qualitative data collection methods suffer from challenges related to…
Synthetic data has become an important tool in the fine-tuning of language models to follow instructions and solve complex problems. Nevertheless, the majority of open data to date is often lacking multi-turn data and collected on closed…
Large language models (LLMs) hold potential for innovative HCI research, including the creation of synthetic personae. However, their black-box nature and propensity for hallucinations pose challenges. To address these limitations, this…
Managing natural dialogue timing is a significant challenge for voice-based chatbots. Most current systems usually rely on simple silence detection, which often fails because human speech patterns involve irregular pauses. This causes bots…
The development of chatbots requires collecting a large number of human-chatbot dialogues to reflect the breadth of users' sociodemographic backgrounds and conversational goals. However, the resource requirements to conduct the respective…
When faced with complex and uncertain medical conditions (e.g., cancer, mental health conditions, recovery from substance dependency), millions of patients seek online peer support. In this study, we leverage content analysis of online…
Large language models (LLMs) are being used as ad-hoc therapists. Research suggests that LLMs outperform human counselors when generating a single, isolated empathetic response; however, their session-level behavior remains understudied. In…
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, exhibit advanced capabilities in generating text, images, and videos. However, their effective use remains constrained by challenges in prompt formulation, personalization, and opaque…
Psychiatric comorbidity is clinically significant yet challenging due to the complexity of multiple co-occurring disorders. To address this, we develop a novel approach integrating synthetic patient electronic medical record (EMR)…