StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue

Yuxiong Wang, Ziwei Lin, Bo Wang, Yu Zhang, Shiguang Ni


Abstract
Positive psychology dialogue aims to support emotional distress and positive resource building, requiring models to produce not only empathetic replies but also coherent progression through a multi-turn support process. Existing resources often reduce supervision to turn-level strategies or holistic preference labels, leaving process position, support function, and local repair targets implicit. We introduce StageWell, a process-aligned Chinese corpus for positive psychology dialogue, together with HQS, a structured protocol for data construction and evaluation. StageWell organizes support into a six-stage support process and uses a multi-agent whole-dialogue rewriting workflow to construct 12,445 SFT instances, 1,849 DPO preference pairs, and a GroundTruth subset of 120 expert-revised dialogues and 977 QA pairs. Guided by HQS, DPO pairs are built as process-localized repairs: flawed model outputs are used as rejected responses, and targeted rewrites under the same context and stage constraint are used as chosen responses. Across four 9B–14B open-source LLMs, this supervision yields robust gains in process control, response quality, and safety. Averaged across models, BERTScore improves by 0.037, Q-Overall increases by 1.32 points, S-exact increases by 0.236, and the H-critical rate decreases by 0.167. These results highlight the value of modeling supportive dialogue as a structured multi-turn support process rather than as single-turn response generation. We make our dataset available for research.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlp4pi-1.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Katherine Atwell, Angana Borah, Daryna Dementieva, Elisa Kreiss, Neema Kotonya, Jiarui Liu, Liz Olson, Ruyuan Wan, Jieyu Zhao
Venues:
NLP4PI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
452–481
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.36/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxiong Wang, Ziwei Lin, Bo Wang, Yu Zhang, and Shiguang Ni. 2026. StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 452–481, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue (Wang et al., NLP4PI 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.36.pdf