Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Prompting

Zhiyu Chen, Yujie Lu, William Wang


Abstract
Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues of our time, due to the severe scarcity and accessibility limit of professionals. Psychotherapy requires high-level expertise to conduct deep, complex reasoning and analysis on the cognition modeling of the patients. In the era of Large Language Models, we believe it is the right time to develop AI assistance for computational psychotherapy. We study the task of cognitive distortion detection and propose the Diagnosis of Thought (DoT) prompting. DoT performs diagnosis on the patient’s speech via three stages: subjectivity assessment to separate the facts and the thoughts; contrastive reasoning to elicit the reasoning processes supporting and contradicting the thoughts; and schema analysis to summarize the cognition schemas. The generated diagnosis rationales through the three stages are essential for assisting the professionals. Experiments demonstrate that DoT obtains significant improvements over ChatGPT for cognitive distortion detection, while generating high-quality rationales approved by human experts.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.284
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4295–4304
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.284
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.284
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyu Chen, Yujie Lu, and William Wang. 2023. Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Prompting. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 4295–4304, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Prompting (Chen et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.284.pdf