Dana Atzil–Slonim

Neha Warikoo, Tobias Mayer, Dana Atzil-Slonim et al.

Emotions are experienced and expressed through various response systems. Coherence between emotional experience and emotional expression is considered important to clients' well being. To date, emotional coherence (EC) has been studied at a single time point using lab-based tasks with relatively small datasets. No study has examined EC between the subjective experience of emotions and emotion expression in therapy or whether this coherence is associated with clients' well being. Natural language Processing (NLP) approaches have been applied to identify emotions from psychotherapy dialogue, which can be implemented to study emotional processes on a larger scale. However, these methods have yet to be used to study coherence between emotional experience and emotional expression over the course of therapy and whether it relates to clients' well-being. This work presents an end-to-end approach where we use emotion predictions from our transformer based emotion recognition model to study emotional coherence and its diagnostic potential in psychotherapy research. We first employ our transformer based approach on a Hebrew psychotherapy dataset to automatically label clients' emotions at utterance level in psychotherapy dialogues. We subsequently investigate the emotional coherence between clients' self-reported emotional states and our model-based emotion predictions. We also examine the association between emotional coherence and clients' well being. Our findings indicate a significant correlation between clients' self-reported emotions and positive and negative emotions expressed verbally during psychotherapy sessions. Coherence in positive emotions was also highly correlated with clients well-being. These results illustrate how NLP can be applied to identify important emotional processes in psychotherapy to improve diagnosis and treatment for clients suffering from mental-health problems.

Jiayu Song, Jenny Chim, Adam Tsakalidis et al.

We introduce a hybrid abstractive summarisation approach combining hierarchical VAE with LLMs (LlaMA-2) to produce clinically meaningful summaries from social media user timelines, appropriate for mental health monitoring. The summaries combine two different narrative points of view: clinical insights in third person useful for a clinician are generated by feeding into an LLM specialised clinical prompts, and importantly, a temporally sensitive abstractive summary of the user's timeline in first person, generated by a novel hierarchical variational autoencoder, TH-VAE. We assess the generated summaries via automatic evaluation against expert summaries and via human evaluation with clinical experts, showing that timeline summarisation by TH-VAE results in more factual and logically coherent summaries rich in clinical utility and superior to LLM-only approaches in capturing changes over time.

Jiayu Song, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Dana Atzil Slonim et al.

This paper explores whether enhancing temporal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) can improve the quality of timeline summarisation, the task of summarising long texts containing sequences of events, such as social media threads. We first introduce NarrativeReason, a novel dataset focused on temporal relationships among sequential events within narratives, distinguishing it from existing temporal reasoning datasets that primarily address pair-wise event relationships. Our approach then combines temporal reasoning with timeline summarisation through a knowledge distillation framework, where we first fine-tune a teacher model on temporal reasoning tasks and then distill this knowledge into a student model while simultaneously training it for the task of timeline summarisation. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on out-of-domain mental health-related timeline summarisation tasks, which involve long social media threads with repetitions of events and a mix of emotions, highlighting the importance and generalisability of leveraging temporal reasoning to improve timeline summarisation.