What Makes a Good Counselor? Learning to Distinguish between High-quality and Low-quality Counseling Conversations

Verónica Pérez-Rosas, Xinyi Wu, Kenneth Resnicow, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: The quality of a counseling intervention relies highly on the active collaboration between clients and counselors. In this paper, we explore several linguistic aspects of the collaboration process occurring during counseling conversations. Specifically, we address the differences between high-quality and low-quality counseling. Our approach examines participants’ turn-by-turn interaction, their linguistic alignment, the sentiment expressed by speakers during the conversation, as well as the different topics being discussed. Our results suggest important language differences in low- and high-quality counseling, which we further use to derive linguistic features able to capture the differences between the two groups. These features are then used to build automatic classifiers that can predict counseling quality with accuracies of up to 88%.