ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Support
This addresses mental health support needs by providing a domain-specific AI tool, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM methods with new data.
The paper tackles mental health support by developing ChatCounselor, a large language model trained on 260 real psychologist-client conversations, which outperforms open-source models and approaches ChatGPT's performance on a specialized counseling benchmark.
This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively, ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific data.