Language Features For Automated Evaluation Of Cognitive Behavior Psychotherapy Sessions

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapy treatment that uses cognitive change strategies to address mental health problems. Quality assessment of a CBT session is traditionally addressed by human raters who evaluate recorded sessions along specific behavioral codes, a cost prohibitive and time consuming method. In this work we examine how linguistic features can be effectively used to develop an automatic competency rating tool for CBT. We explore both standard, widely used lexical features and domain-specific ones, adapting methods which have been successfully used in similar psychotherapy session coding tasks. Experiments are conducted on manual transcripts of CBT sessions and on automatically derived ones, thus introducing an end-to-end approach. Our results suggest that a real-world system could be developed to automatically evaluate CBT sessions to assist training, supervision, or quality assurance of services.