Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning

Zhouhang Xie, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Mengjie Zhao, Yoshinori Maeda, Keiichi Yamada, Hiromi Wakaki, Julian McAuley


Abstract
We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes, Motivational Interviewing (MI). Addressing such a task requires a system that could infer how to motivate the user effectively. We propose DIIR, a framework that is capable of learning and applying conversation strategies in the form of natural language inductive rules from expert demonstrations. Automatic and human evaluation on instruction-following large language models show natural language strategies descriptions discovered by DIIR can improve active listening skills, reduce unsolicited advice, and promote more collaborative and less authoritative conversations, outperforming in-context demonstrations that are over 50 times longer.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.782
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13207–13219
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.782
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.782
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhouhang Xie, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Mengjie Zhao, Yoshinori Maeda, Keiichi Yamada, Hiromi Wakaki, and Julian McAuley. 2024. Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 13207–13219, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning (Xie et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.782.pdf