An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives

Young Min Cho, Sunny Rai, Lyle Ungar, João Sedoc, Sharath Guntuku


Abstract
Mental health conversational agents (a.k.a. chatbots) are widely studied for their potential to offer accessible support to those experiencing mental health challenges. Previous surveys on the topic primarily consider papers published in either computer science or medicine, leading to a divide in understanding and hindering the sharing of beneficial knowledge between both domains. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive literature review using the PRISMA framework, reviewing 534 papers published in both computer science and medicine. Our systematic review reveals 136 key papers on building mental health-related conversational agents with diverse characteristics of modeling and experimental design techniques. We find that computer science papers focus on LLM techniques and evaluating response quality using automated metrics with little attention to the application while medical papers use rule-based conversational agents and outcome metrics to measure the health outcomes of participants. Based on our findings on transparency, ethics, and cultural heterogeneity in this review, we provide a few recommendations to help bridge the disciplinary divide and enable the cross-disciplinary development of mental health conversational agents.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.698
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11346–11369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.698
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.698
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Young Min Cho, Sunny Rai, Lyle Ungar, João Sedoc, and Sharath Guntuku. 2023. An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11346–11369, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives (Cho et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.698.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.698.mp4