Multi-Session Client-Centered Treatment Outcome Evaluation in Psychotherapy

Hongbin Na, Tao Shen, Shumao Yu, Ling Chen


Abstract
In psychotherapy, therapeutic outcome assessment, or treatment outcome evaluation, is essential to mental health care by systematically evaluating therapeutic processes and outcomes. Existing large language model approaches often focus on therapist-centered, single-session evaluations, neglecting the client’s subjective experience and longitudinal progress across multiple sessions. To address these limitations, we propose IPAEval, a client-Informed Psychological Assessment-based Evaluation framework, which automates treatment outcome evaluations from the client’s perspective using clinical interviews. It integrates cross-session client-contextual assessment and session-focused client-dynamics assessment for a comprehensive understanding of therapeutic progress. Specifically, IPAEval employs a two-stage prompt scheme that maps client information onto psychometric test items, enabling interpretable and structured psychological assessments. Experiments on our new TheraPhase dataset, comprising 400 paired initial and completion stage client records, demonstrate that IPAEval effectively tracks symptom severity and treatment outcomes over multiple sessions, outperforming baseline approaches across both closed-source and open-source models, and validating the benefits of items-aware reasoning mechanisms.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.231
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2952–2968
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-231
DOI:
10.63317/3am66kas7b32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongbin Na, Tao Shen, Shumao Yu, and Ling Chen. 2026. Multi-Session Client-Centered Treatment Outcome Evaluation in Psychotherapy. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2952–2968, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Session Client-Centered Treatment Outcome Evaluation in Psychotherapy (Na et al., LREC 2026)
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