Conversation Model Fine-Tuning for Classifying Client Utterances in Counseling Dialogues

Sungjoon Park, Donghyun Kim, Alice Oh


Abstract
The recent surge of text-based online counseling applications enables us to collect and analyze interactions between counselors and clients. A dataset of those interactions can be used to learn to automatically classify the client utterances into categories that help counselors in diagnosing client status and predicting counseling outcome. With proper anonymization, we collect counselor-client dialogues, define meaningful categories of client utterances with professional counselors, and develop a novel neural network model for classifying the client utterances. The central idea of our model, ConvMFiT, is a pre-trained conversation model which consists of a general language model built from an out-of-domain corpus and two role-specific language models built from unlabeled in-domain dialogues. The classification result shows that ConvMFiT outperforms state-of-the-art comparison models. Further, the attention weights in the learned model confirm that the model finds expected linguistic patterns for each category.
Anthology ID:
N19-1148
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1448–1459
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1148
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1148
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sungjoon Park, Donghyun Kim, and Alice Oh. 2019. Conversation Model Fine-Tuning for Classifying Client Utterances in Counseling Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1448–1459, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversation Model Fine-Tuning for Classifying Client Utterances in Counseling Dialogues (Park et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1148.pdf