Modeling Interpersonal Linguistic Coordination in Conversations using Word Mover's Distance

Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexical coordination or entrainment in literature, only a few have explored coordination in syntactic or semantic space. In this work, we attempt to combine these different aspects of coordination into a single measure by leveraging distances in a neural word representation space. In particular, we adopt the recently proposed Word Mover's Distance with word2vec embeddings and extend it to measure the dissimilarity in language used in multiple consecutive speaker turns. To validate our approach, we apply this measure for two case studies in the clinical psychology domain. We find that our proposed measure is correlated with the therapist's empathy towards their patient in Motivational Interviewing and with affective behaviors in Couples Therapy. In both case studies, our proposed metric exhibits higher correlation than previously proposed measures. When applied to the couples with relationship improvement, we also notice a significant decrease in the proposed measure over the course of therapy, indicating higher linguistic coordination

An Automated Quality Evaluation Framework of Psychotherapy Conversations with Local Quality Estimates

Computational approaches for assessing the quality of conversation-based psychotherapy, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Motivational Interviewing (MI), have been developed recently to support quality assurance and clinical training. However, due to the long session lengths and limited modeling resources, computational methods largely rely on frequency-based lexical features or distribution of dialogue acts. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework to automatically evaluate the quality of a CBT interaction. We divide each psychotherapy session into conversation segments and input those into a BERT-based model to produce segment embeddings. We first fine-tune BERT for predicting segment-level (local) quality scores and then use segment embeddings as lower-level input to a Bidirectional LSTM-based neural network to predict session-level (global) quality estimates. In particular, the segment-level quality scores are initialized with the session-level scores and we model the global quality as a function of the local quality scores to achieve the accurate segment-level quality estimates. These estimated segment-level scores benefit theBERT fine-tuning and in learning better segment embeddings. We evaluate the proposed framework on data drawn from real-world CBT clinical session recordings to predict multiple session-level behavior codes. The results indicate that our approach leads to improved evaluation accuracy for most codes in both regression and classification tasks