Adapting from Downturns: Prediction of Long-Term Conversational-Skill Development in Mental-Health Crisis Counselors

从低谷中适应：心理健康危机咨询师长期对话技能发展的预测

Abstract: How do people learn to become better conversationalists? This question is especially important in the context of mental-health counseling, where conversational skills are essential, yet volunteer counselors often have limited access to supervision and structured feedback. Understanding how counselors develop their ability to steer conversations toward positive outcomes — and identifying early which counselors are (not) on track to improve — can help prioritize support for the counselors who need it most.

摘要： 人们是如何学会成为更好的对话者的？这个问题在心理健康咨询领域尤为重要。在这一领域，对话技巧至关重要，但志愿者咨询师往往难以获得充分的督导和结构化的反馈。了解咨询师如何培养引导对话走向积极结果的能力，并尽早识别出哪些咨询师正处于（或未处于）进步轨道上，有助于为最需要帮助的咨询师优先提供支持。

In this work, we introduce the task of predicting, early in a conversationalist’s career, whether they will eventually improve at steering conversations toward positive outcomes, and demonstrate the feasibility of this task in the case of volunteer mental-health crisis counselors.

在这项工作中，我们引入了一项任务：在对话者职业生涯的早期阶段，预测他们最终是否会提高引导对话走向积极结果的能力，并以志愿者心理健康危机咨询师为例，证明了该任务的可行性。

Our central insight is that people may struggle with particular kinds of moments in a conversation, and that what is especially revealing of their likelihood of future improvement is how they learn to handle those moments over time. We operationalize this insight by designing a method that identifies the types of moments a counselor initially struggles with, captures how they adapt their response when they re-encounter similar moments in subsequent conversations, and learns which early adaptations lead to improvement months or even years later.

我们的核心见解是：人们在对话中可能会在某些特定时刻感到困难，而真正能揭示其未来进步可能性的，是他们如何随着时间的推移学会处理这些时刻。我们将这一见解付诸实践，设计了一种方法：识别咨询师最初感到困难的时刻类型，捕捉他们在后续对话中再次遇到类似时刻时如何调整应对方式，并学习哪些早期的适应性调整能够预示数月甚至数年后的进步。

While this future-prediction task is challenging, our counselor-adaptation approach yields better results than baselines that learn directly from the conversation transcript.

尽管这项未来预测任务极具挑战性，但我们的“咨询师适应性”方法比直接从对话记录中学习的基准模型取得了更好的结果。