Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish

Aylin Ece Gunal, Bowen Yi, John D. Piette, Rada Mihalcea, Veronica Perez-Rosas

Abstract: Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.