Jinho D. Choi

Jaemin Shin, Hyungjun Yoon, Seungjoo Lee et al.

Psychiatrists diagnose mental disorders via the linguistic use of patients. Still, due to data privacy, existing passive mental health monitoring systems use alternative features such as activity, app usage, and location via mobile devices. We propose FedTherapist, a mobile mental health monitoring system that utilizes continuous speech and keyboard input in a privacy-preserving way via federated learning. We explore multiple model designs by comparing their performance and overhead for FedTherapist to overcome the complex nature of on-device language model training on smartphones. We further propose a Context-Aware Language Learning (CALL) methodology to effectively utilize smartphones' large and noisy text for mental health signal sensing. Our IRB-approved evaluation of the prediction of self-reported depression, stress, anxiety, and mood from 46 participants shows higher accuracy of FedTherapist compared with the performance with non-language features, achieving 0.15 AUROC improvement and 8.21% MAE reduction.

James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

We demonstrate substantial performance gains in zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) by enhancing training data diversity through synthetic data generation. Existing DST datasets are severely limited in the number of application domains and slot types they cover due to the high costs of data collection, restricting their adaptability to new domains. This work addresses this challenge with a novel, fully automatic data generation approach that creates synthetic zero-shot DST datasets. Distinguished from previous methods, our approach can generate dialogues across a massive range of application domains, complete with silver-standard dialogue state annotations and slot descriptions. This technique is used to create the D0T dataset for training zero-shot DST models, encompassing an unprecedented 1,000+ domains. Experiments on the MultiWOZ benchmark show that training models on diverse synthetic data improves Joint Goal Accuracy by 6.7%, achieving results competitive with models 13.5 times larger than ours.

Andrew G. Breithaupt, Nayoung Choi, James D. Finch et al.

Early detection of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) is critical for timely intervention, yet most diagnoses are delayed until advanced stages. While comprehensive patient narratives are essential for accurate diagnosis, prior work has largely focused on screening studies that classify cognitive status from interactions rather than supporting the diagnostic process. We designed voice-interactive conversational agents, leveraging large language models (LLMs), to elicit narratives relevant to ADRD from patients and informants. We evaluated the agent with 30 adults with suspected ADRD through conversation analysis (n=30), user surveys (n=19), and clinical validation against blinded specialist interviews (n=24). Symptoms detected by the agent aligned well with those identified by specialists across symptoms. Users appreciated the agent's patience and systematic questioning, which supported engagement and expression of complex, hard-to-describe experiences. This preliminary work suggests conversational agents may serve as structured front-end tools for dementia assessment, highlighting interaction design considerations in sensitive healthcare contexts.

James D. Finch, Yasasvi Josyula, Jinho D. Choi

In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, Slot Schema Induction (SSI) is essential for automatically identifying key information slots from dialogue data without manual intervention. This paper presents a novel state-of-the-art (SoTA) approach that formulates SSI as a text generation task, where a language model incrementally constructs and refines a slot schema over a stream of dialogue data. To develop this approach, we present a fully automatic LLM-based TOD simulation method that creates data with high-quality state labels for novel task domains. Furthermore, we identify issues in SSI evaluation due to data leakage and poor metric alignment with human judgment. We resolve these by creating new evaluation data using our simulation method with human guidance and correction, as well as designing improved evaluation metrics. These contributions establish a foundation for future SSI research and advance the SoTA in dialogue understanding and system development.