Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Dec 29, 2021)
Date Submitted: Dec 25, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Creating a Conversational Agent in Psychotherapy Using Natural Language Processing: Recognizing User Intents
ABSTRACT
Background:
In recent years there has been a growth of psychological chatbots performing important functions from checking symptoms to providing psychoeducation and guiding self-help exercises. Technologically these chatbots are based on traditional decision-tree algorithms with limited keyword recognition. A key challenge to the development of conversational artificial intelligence is intent recognition or understanding the goal that the user wants to accomplish. The user query on psychological topic is often emotional, highly contextual and non goal-oriented, and therefore may contain vague, mixed or multiple intents.
Objective:
In this study we attempt to identify and categorize user intents with relation to psychological topics.
Methods:
We collected a dataset of 43 000 logs from the iCognito Anti-depression chatbot which consists of user answers to the chatbot questions about the reason of their emotional distress. The data was labeled manually. The BERT model was used for classification.
Results:
We have identified 24 classes of user intents that can be grouped into larger categories, such as: a) intents to improve emotional state; b) intents to improve interpersonal relations; c) intents to improve physical condition; d) intents to solve practical problems; e) intents to make a decision; f) intents to harm oneself or commit suicide; g) intent to blame or criticize oneself.
Conclusions:
This classification may be used for the development of conversational artificial intelligence in the field of psychotherapy.
Citation
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Copyright
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