Large-scale Analysis of Counseling Conversations: An Application of Natural Language Processing to Mental Health

Understand

Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time.

• While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack of large-scale data with labeled outcomes of the conversations.
• In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study on the discourse of text-message-based counseling conversations.
• We develop a set of novel computational discourse analysis methods to measure how various linguistic aspects of conversations are correlated with conversation outcomes.