
Leveraging Open Data and Task Augmentation to Automated Behavioral
Coding of Psychotherapy Conversations in Low-Resource Scenarios
Zhuohao Chen1, Nikolaos Flemotomos1∗
, Zac E. Imel2, David C. Atkins3,
Shrikanth Narayanan1
1University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
3University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
sail.usc.edu zac.imel@utah.edu datkins@u.washington.edu
Abstract
In psychotherapy interactions, the quality of
a session is assessed by codifying the com-
municative behaviors of participants during
the conversation through manual observation
and annotation. Developing computational ap-
proaches for automated behavioral coding can
reduce the burden on human coders and facil-
itate the objective evaluation of the interven-
tion. In the real world, however, implementing
such algorithms is associated with data spar-
sity challenges since privacy concerns lead to
limited available in-domain data. In this paper,
we leverage a publicly available conversation-
based dataset and transfer knowledge to the
low-resource behavioral coding task by per-
forming an intermediate language model train-
ing via meta-learning. We introduce a task aug-
mentation method to produce a large number
of “analogy tasks” — tasks similar to the tar-
get one — and demonstrate that the proposed
framework predicts target behaviors more ac-
curately than all the other baseline models.
1 Introduction
Advances in spoken language processing tech-
niques have improved the quality of life across
several domains. One of the striking applications is
automated behavioral coding in the fields of health-
care conversations such as psychotherapy. Behav-
ioral coding is a procedure during which experts
manually identify and annotate the participants’
behaviors (Cooper et al.,2012). However, this pro-
cess suffers from a high cost in terms of both time
and human resources (Fairburn and Cooper,2011).
Building computational models for automated be-
havioral coding can significantly reduce the cost in
time and provide scalable analytical insights into
the interaction. A great amount of such work has
been developed, including for addiction counseling
∗
Work done while Nikolaos Flemotomos was at Univer-
sity of Southern California in 2022, and he is now affiliated to
Apple Inc.
(Tanana et al.,2016;Pérez-Rosas et al.,2017;Chen
et al.,2019;Flemotomos et al.,2022) and couples
therapy (Li et al.,2016;Tseng et al.,2016;Big-
giogera et al.,2021). However, automated coding
is associated with data sparsity due to the highly
sensitive nature of the data and the costs of human
annotation. Due to those reasons, both samples and
labels of in-domain data are typically limited. This
paper aims to train computational models for pre-
dicting behavior codes directly from psychotherapy
utterances through classification tasks with limited
in-domain data.
Recently, substantial work has shown the suc-
cess of universal language representation via pre-
training context-rich language models on large cor-
pora (Peters et al.,2018;Howard and Ruder,2018).
Particularly, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Repre-
sentations from Transformers) has achieved state-
of-the-art performance in many natural language
processing (NLP) tasks and provided strong base-
lines in low-resource scenarios (Devlin et al.,2019).
However, these models rely on self-supervised pre-
training on a large out-of-domain text corpus. In
prior works, the data sparsity issue has also been
addressed by introducing an intermediate task pre-
training using some other high-resource dataset
(Houlsby et al.,2019;Liu et al.,2019;Vu et al.,
2020). However, not all the source tasks yield posi-
tive gains. Sometimes the intermediate task might
even lead to degradation due to the negative trans-
fer (Pruksachatkun et al.,2020;Lange et al.,2021;
Poth et al.,2021). To improve the chance of finding
a good transfer source, we need to collect as many
source tasks as possible. Another approach is meta-
learning which aims to find optimal initialization
for fine-tuning with limited target data (Gu et al.,
2018;Dou et al.,2019;Qian and Yu,2019). This
approach also calls for enough source tasks and is
affected by any potential task dissimilarity (Jose
and Simeone,2021;Zhou et al.,2021).
The challenge we need to handle is that both
arXiv:2210.14254v1 [cs.CL] 25 Oct 2022