@InProceedings{roemmele-mardo-gordon:2017:CLPsych,
  author    = {Roemmele, Melissa  and  Mardo, Paola  and  Gordon, Andrew},
  title     = {Natural-language Interactive Narratives in Imaginal Exposure Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology --- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality},
  month     = {August},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Vancouver, BC},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {48--57},
  abstract  = {Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety-based disorder that affects
	around 2.5% of the population. A common treatment for OCD is exposure therapy,
	where the patient repeatedly confronts a feared experience, which has the
	long-term effect of decreasing their anxiety. Some exposures consist of reading
	and writing stories about an imagined anxiety-provoking scenario. In this
	paper, we present a technology that enables patients to interactively
	contribute to exposure stories by supplying natural language input (typed or
	spoken) that advances a scenario. This interactivity could potentially increase
	the patient's sense of immersion in an exposure and contribute to its success.
	We introduce the NLP task behind processing inputs to predict new events in the
	scenario, and describe our initial approach. We then illustrate the future
	possibility of this work with an example of an exposure scenario authored with
	our application.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-3106}
}