STAMPsy: Towards SpatioTemporal-Aware Mixed-Type Dialogues for Psychological Counseling
This addresses the problem of limited dialogue diversity in online psychological counseling systems for clients seeking multi-type help, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing dialogue types with new data integration.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling by introducing STAMPsy, a dataset with over 5,000 conversations covering five dialogue types and spatiotemporal-aware knowledge, and results show that clarifying dialogue goals and using spatiotemporal states are effective.
Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic dialogue or QA with minimal professional knowledge and without goal guidance. In many real-world counseling scenarios, clients often seek multi-type help, such as diagnosis, consultation, therapy, console, and common questions, but existing dialogue systems struggle to combine different dialogue types naturally. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling that enable clients to clarify their goals before proceeding with counseling. To mitigate the challenge, we collect a mixed-type counseling dialogues corpus termed STAMPsy, covering five dialogue types, task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, knowledge-grounded dialogue, conversational recommendation, empathetic dialogue, and question answering, over 5,000 conversations. Moreover, spatiotemporal-aware knowledge enables systems to have world awareness and has been proven to affect one's mental health. Therefore, we link dialogues in STAMPsy to spatiotemporal state and propose a spatiotemporal-aware mixed-type psychological counseling dataset. Additionally, we build baselines on STAMPsy and develop an iterative self-feedback psychological dialogue generation framework, named Self-STAMPsy. Results indicate that clarifying dialogue goals in advance and utilizing spatiotemporal states are effective.