Creation, Analysis and Evaluation of AnnoMI, a Dataset of Expert-Annotated Counselling Dialogues

Research on the analysis of counselling conversations through natural language processing methods has seen remarkable growth in recent years. However, the potential of this field is still greatly limited by the lack of access to publicly available therapy dialogues, especially those with expert annotations, but it has been alleviated thanks to the recent release of AnnoMI, the first publicly and freely available conversation dataset of 133 faithfully transcribed and expert-annotated demonstrations of high- and low-quality motivational interviewing (MI)—an effective therapy strategy that evokes client motivation for positive change. In this work, we introduce new expert-annotated utterance attributes to AnnoMI and describe the entire data collection process in more detail, including dialogue source selection, transcription, annotation, and post-processing. Based on the expert annotations on key MI aspects, we carry out thorough analyses of AnnoMI with respect to counselling-related properties on the utterance, conversation, and corpus levels. Furthermore, we introduce utterance-level prediction tasks with potential real-world impacts and build baseline models. Finally, we examine the performance of the models on dialogues of different topics and probe the generalisability of the models to unseen topics.