PARTNER: A Persuasive Mental Health and Legal Counselling Dialogue System for Women and Children Crime Victims

PARTNER: A Persuasive Mental Health and Legal Counselling Dialogue System for Women and Children Crime Victims

Priyanshu Priya, Kshitij Mishra, Palak Totala, Asif Ekbal

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI for Good. Pages 6183-6191. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/686

The World Health Organization has underlined the significance of expediting the preventive measures for crime against women and children to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (promoting well-being, gender equality, and equal access to justice). The crime victims typically need mental health and legal counselling support for their ultimate well-being and sometimes they need to be persuaded to seek desired support. Further, counselling interactions should adopt correct politeness and empathy strategies so that a warm, amicable, and respectful environment can be built to better understand the victims’ situations. To this end, we propose PARTNER, a Politeness and empAthy strategies-adaptive peRsuasive dialogue sysTem for meNtal health and LEgal counselling of cRime victims. For this, first, we create a novel mental HEalth and legAl counseLling conversational dataset HEAL, annotated with three distinct aspects, viz. counselling act, politeness strategy, and empathy strategy. Then, by formulating a novel reward function, we train a counselling dialogue system in a reinforcement learning setting to ensure correct counselling act, politeness strategy, and empathy strategy in the generated responses. Extensive empirical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed reward function ensures persuasive counselling responses with correct polite and empathetic tone in the generated responses. Further, PARTNER proves its efficacy to engage the victim by generating diverse and natural responses.
Keywords:
AI for Good: Humans and AI
AI for Good: Natural Language Processing