ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Support

TL;DR

This paper describes the ACM LaTeX template acmart and its role in standardizing manuscript preparation for ACM conferences and journals. It explains the design of the Template Overview, Template Styles, and Template Parameters, detailing how to select publication-specific styles and configure metadata, accessibility, and rights declarations. The work emphasizes guidelines to ensure consistency, metadata extraction, and correct formatting, including the use of Libertine fonts and ACM Reference Format. It is a practical guide that simplifies producing camera-ready manuscripts and improves interoperability with ACM's digital library and indexing systems.

Abstract

This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively, ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific data.