Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles

Ryan Louie, Ananjan Nandi, William Fang, Cheng Chang, Emma Brunskill, Diyi Yang


Abstract
Recent works leverage LLMs to roleplay realistic social scenarios, aiding novices in practicing their social skills. However, simulating sensitive interactions, such as in the domain of mental health, is challenging. Privacy concerns restrict data access, and collecting expert feedback, although vital, is laborious. To address this, we develop Roleplay-doh, a novel human-LLM collaboration pipeline that elicits qualitative feedback from a domain-expert, which is transformed into a set of principles, or natural language rules, that govern an LLM-prompted roleplay. We apply this pipeline to enable senior mental health supporters to create customized AI patients as simulated practice partners for novice counselors. After uncovering issues with basic GPT-4 simulations not adhering to expert-defined principles, we also introduce a novel principle-adherence prompting pipeline which shows a 30% improvement in response quality and principle following for the downstream task. Through a user study with 25 counseling experts, we demonstrate that the pipeline makes it easy and effective to create AI patients that more faithfully resemble real patients, as judged by both creators and third-party counselors. We provide access to the code and data on our project website: https://roleplay-doh.github.io/.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.591
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10570–10603
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.591
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryan Louie, Ananjan Nandi, William Fang, Cheng Chang, Emma Brunskill, and Diyi Yang. 2024. Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10570–10603, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles (Louie et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.591.pdf