Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5276–5289 July 5 - 10, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 5276 Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards Justine Zhang Cornell University jz727@cornell.edu Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Cornell University cristian@cs.cornell.edu Abstract Throughout a conversation, participants make choices that can orient the flow of the inter- action. Such choices are particularly salient in the consequential domain of crisis counsel- ing, where a difficulty for counselors is balanc- ing between two key objectives: advancing the conversation towards a resolution, and empa- thetically addressing the crisis situation. In this work, we develop an unsupervised methodology to quantify how counselors man- age this balance. Our main intuition is that if an utterance can only receive a narrow range of appropriate replies, then its likely aim is to advance the conversation forwards, towards a target within that range. Likewise, an ut- terance that can only appropriately follow a narrow range of possible utterances is likely aimed backwards at addressing a specific sit- uation within that range. By applying this in- tuition, we can map each utterance to a contin- uous orientation axis that captures the degree to which it is intended to direct the flow of the conversation forwards or backwards. This unsupervised method allows us to char- acterize counselor behaviors in a large dataset of crisis counseling conversations, where we show that known counseling strategies intu- itively align with this axis. We also illustrate how our measure can be indicative of a conver- sation’s progress, as well as its effectiveness. 1 Introduction Participants in a conversation constantly shape the flow of the interaction through their choices. In psychological crisis counseling conversations, where counselors support individuals in mental distress, these choices arise in uniquely complex and high-stakes circumstances, and are reflected in rich conversational dynamics (Sacks, 1992). As such, counseling is a valuable context for computa- tionally modeling conversational behavior (Atkins when i tell my mom about the bullies she just ignores me Have you confided to anyone else about this? yeah there’s my sister… she just tells me to get over it That sounds so frustrating, you deserve to be listened to. t0 t1 t2 c1 c2 Figure 1: Two possible exchanges in a counseling con- versation, illustrating key objectives that a counselor must balance: c1 aims to advance the conversation to- wards a discussion of possible confidants; c2 aims to ad- dress the emotion underlying the preceding utterance. et al., 2014; Althoff et al., 2016; P´erez-Rosas et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019). Modeling the conversa- tional choices of counselors in this endeavor is an important step towards better supporting them. Counselors are driven by several objectives that serve the broader goal of helping the individual in distress; two key objectives are exemplified in Figure 1.1 The counselor must advance a conver- sation towards a calmer state where the individ- ual is better equipped to cope with their situation (Mishara et al., 2007; Sandoval et al., 2009): in …

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