title: "It sounds like...": A natural language processing approach to detecting counselor reflections in motivational interviewing.
abstract: The dissemination and evaluation of evidence-based behavioral treatments for substance abuse problems rely on the evaluation of counselor interventions. In Motivational Interviewing (MI), a treatment that directs the therapist to utilize a particular linguistic style, proficiency is assessed via behavioral coding-a time consuming, nontechnological approach. Natural language processing techniques have the potential to scale up the evaluation of behavioral treatments such as MI. We present a novel computational approach to assessing components of MI, focusing on 1 specific counselor behavior-reflections, which are believed to be a critical MI ingredient. Using 57 sessions from 3 MI clinical trials, we automatically detected counselor reflections in a maximum entropy Markov modeling framework using the raw linguistic data derived from session transcripts. We achieved 93% recall, 90% specificity, and 73% precision. Results provide insight into the linguistic information used by coders to make ratings and demonstrate the feasibility of new computational approaches to scaling up the evaluation of behavioral treatments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California.
authors.forename: Doğan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Can
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington.
authors.forename: Rebeca A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Marín
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California.
authors.forename: Panayiotis G
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0790-7161
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Georgiou
authors.affiliation: Department of Educational Psychology, University of Utah.
authors.forename: Zac E
authors.initials: ZE
authors.lastname: Imel
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington.
authors.forename: David C
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5781-9880
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Atkins
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California.
authors.forename: Shrikanth S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Narayanan
mesh_terms: D001521:Behavior Therapy / Q000379:methods; D003376:Counseling / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D062405:Motivational Interviewing / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*