- 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,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.…

