Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish
This addresses the problem of cultural and language biases in counseling NLP for Spanish-speaking populations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing English-based methods.
The paper tackles the lack of NLP research on counseling in non-English languages by introducing MIDAS, a Spanish counseling dataset with expert annotations, and uses it to explore language-based differences and develop classifiers for behavioral coding tasks, achieving applications in monolingual and multilingual settings.
Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.