A Natural Language Generation Technique for Automated Psychotherapy.

The need for software applications that can assist with mental disorders has never been greater. Individuals suffering from mental illnesses often avoid consultation with a psychotherapist, because they do not realize the need, or because they cannot or will not face the social and economic consequences, which can be severe. Between ideal treatment by a human therapist and self-help websites lies the possibility of a helpful interaction with a language-using computer. A model of empathic response planning for sentence generation in a forthcoming automated psychotherapist is described here. The model combines emotional state tracking, contextual information from the patient’s history and continuously updated therapeutic goals to form suitable conceptual graphs that may then be realized as suitable textual sentences.