What Makes a Good Counselor? Learning to Distinguish between
High-quality and Low-quality Counseling Conversations
Abstract
The quality of a counseling intervention relies highly on the active collaboration between
clients and counselors. In this paper, we explore several linguistic aspects of the collaboration process occurring during counseling
conversations. Specifically, we address the differences between high-quality and low-quality
counseling. Our approach examines participants’ turn-by-turn interaction, their linguistic
alignment, the sentiment expressed by speakers during the conversation, as well as the different topics being discussed. Our results suggest important language differences in lowand high-quality counseling, which we further
use to derive linguistic features able to capture
the differences between the two groups. These
features are then used to build automatic classifiers that can predict counseling quality with
accuracies of up to 88%