Expressive Interviewing: A Conversational System for Coping with COVID-19
This addresses mental health issues for people affected by COVID-19, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like motivational interviewing and expressive writing.
The authors tackled the mental health challenges of COVID-19 by developing Expressive Interviewing, a conversational system that encourages users to express their thoughts through writing, and showed its potential in helping users cope with COVID-19 issues in a comparative evaluation.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns for many regarding personal and public health implications, financial security and economic stability. Alongside many other unprecedented challenges, there are increasing concerns over social isolation and mental health. We introduce \textit{Expressive Interviewing}--an interview-style conversational system that draws on ideas from motivational interviewing and expressive writing. Expressive Interviewing seeks to encourage users to express their thoughts and feelings through writing by asking them questions about how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. We present relevant aspects of the system's design and implementation as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses of user interactions with the system. In addition, we conduct a comparative evaluation with a general purpose dialogue system for mental health that shows our system potential in helping users to cope with COVID-19 issues.