Core Concepts
A novel ontology framework, SEO, is proposed to integrate symptom-related task-oriented dialogue and empathy-related chit-chat strategies, enabling comprehensive and empathetic depression diagnosis dialogues.
Abstract
The content discusses the development of a depression diagnosis-oriented chatbot that combines task-oriented dialogue (TOD) and chit-chat characteristics, named Task-Oriented Chat (TOC). The key challenges addressed are:
- Achieving high accuracy in task completion for diagnosis purposes while current systems often omit core symptom acquisition and jump to inaccurate diagnostic conclusions.
- Delivering rich and appropriate empathetic responses, which is crucial for building therapeutic alliance but is limited in current dialogue systems.
To address these challenges, the authors propose a novel ontology framework called SEO (Symptom-related and Empathy-related Ontology). SEO comprises two distinct components:
- Symptom-related TOD ontology based on DSM-5 criteria, emphasizing accurate diagnosis.
- Empathy-related chit-chat ontology inspired by Helping Skills Theory, focusing on providing emotional support.
The flexible and dynamic transition between these two aspects is essential, as chit-chat interactions form an inherent part of the diagnostic process. Extensive experiments on the annotated D4 dataset demonstrate that the SEO ontology enables pre-training sequence-to-sequence models to effectively achieve multiple objectives in TOC, including intent prediction, dialogue state tracking, response generation, and depression risk classification.
The key contributions of this work are:
- Integrating symptom and empathy ontologies in depression diagnosis, essential for comprehensive understanding and utilization of real-world interactive nuances.
- Formally defining TOC in a real-world dialogue scenario by jointly modeling TOD and chit-chat components.
- Experimental validation showing the SEO ontology enables effective achievement of multiple objectives in TOC.
Stats
"Chatbots can serve as a viable tool for pre-
liminary depression diagnosis via interactive
conversations with potential patients."
"Depression diagnostic dialogue demands high
accuracy in task completion for diagnosis pur-
poses."
"Current dialogue systems have difficulty in
delivering rich and appropriate empathetic re-
sponses."
Quotes
"SEO integrates symptom and empathy strategies but goes beyond simple combination: the flexible and dynamic transition between the two aspects is essential as chit-chat interactions form an inherent part of the diagnostic process."
"For the first time, TOC is formally de-
fined in a real-world dialogue scenario by
jointing TOD and chit-chat components in
depression-diagnosis-chat and analyzing the
cross-domain intent combination and flexible
transitions in this complex dialogue scene."