TY - CHAP A1 - Bayerl, Sebastian Peter A1 - Roccabruna, Gabriel A1 - Chowdhury, Shammur Absar A1 - Ciulli, Tommaso A1 - Danieli, Morena A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Riccardi, Giuseppe T1 - What can Speech and Language Tell us About the Working Alliance in Psychotherapy T2 - Interspeech 2022 N2 - We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory Observer-rated Shortened – a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and relationship – which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items. The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment, and conversational descriptors extracted from the speech and language signals. Our findings provide strong evidence that a subset of these features are strong indicators of working alliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and a novel study to exploit speech and language for characterising working alliance. KW - conversational analysis KW - working alliance KW - psychotherapy Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-347 SP - 2443 EP - 2447 PB - ISCA CY - ISCA ER -