Analysis of client and therapist behavior in counseling sessions can provide helpful insights for assessing the quality of the session and consequently, the client’s behavioral outcome. In this paper, we study the automatic classification of standardized behavior codes (annotations) used for assessment of psychotherapy sessions in Motivational Interviewing (MI). We develop models and examine the classification of client behaviors throughout MI sessions, comparing the performance by models trained on large pretrained embeddings (RoBERTa) versus interpretable and expert-selected features (LIWC). Our best performing model using the pretrained RoBERTa embeddings beats the baseline model, achieving an F1 score of 0.66 in the subject-independent 3-class classification. Through statistical analysis on the classification results, we identify prominent LIWC features that may not have been captured by the model using pretrained embeddings. Although classification using LIWC features underperforms RoBERTa, our findings motivate the future direction of incorporating auxiliary tasks in the classification of MI codes.

This papers describes a data collection setup and a newly recorded dataset. The main purpose of this dataset is to explore patterns in the focus of visual attention of humans under three different conditions - two humans involved in task-based interaction with a robot; same two humans involved in task-based interaction where the robot is replaced by a third human, and a free three-party human interaction. The dataset contains two parts - 6 sessions with duration of approximately 3 hours and 9 sessions with duration of approximately 4.5 hours. Both parts of the dataset are rich in modalities and recorded data streams - they include the streams of three Kinect v2 devices (color, depth, infrared, body and face data), three high quality audio streams, three high resolution GoPro video streams, touch data for the task-based interactions and the system state of the robot. In addition, the second part of the dataset introduces the data streams from three Tobii Pro Glasses 2 eye trackers. The language of all interactions is English and all data streams are spatially and temporally aligned.

This paper describes a novel experimental setup exploiting state-of-the-art capture equipment to collect a multimodally rich game-solving collaborative multiparty dialogue corpus. The corpus is targeted and designed towards the development of a dialogue system platform to explore verbal and nonverbal tutoring strategies in multiparty spoken interactions. The dialogue task is centered on two participants involved in a dialogue aiming to solve a card-ordering game. The participants were paired into teams based on their degree of extraversion as resulted from a personality test. With the participants sits a tutor that helps them perform the task, organizes and balances their interaction and whose behavior was assessed by the participants after each interaction. Different multimodal signals captured and auto-synchronized by different audio-visual capture technologies, together with manual annotations of the tutor’s behavior constitute the Tutorbot corpus. This corpus is exploited to build a situated model of the interaction based on the participants’ temporally-changing state of attention, their conversational engagement and verbal dominance, and their correlation with the verbal and visual feedback and conversation regulatory actions generated by the tutor.