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arXiv · 2409.19533

Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot

Siyuan Chen·Cong Ming·Zhiling Zhang·Yanyi Chen·Kenny Q. Zhu·Mengyue Wu
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Abstract

In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding the help-seeker's situation. Therefore, we propose PsyMix, a chatbot that integrates the analyses of the seeker's state from the perspective of a psychotherapy approach (Chain-of-Psychotherapies, CoP) before generating the response, and learns to incorporate the strength of various psychotherapies by fine-tuning on a mixture of CoPs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we found that PsyMix can outperform the ChatGPT baseline, and demonstrate a comparable level of empathy in its responses to that of human counselors.

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Siyuan Chen, Cong Ming, Zhiling Zhang, Yanyi Chen, Kenny Q. Zhu, Mengyue Wu. 2024-09-29. Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19533

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