Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Access to mental health care is a global challenge that online peer support platforms like TalkLife can help mitigate. Millions of people seek and provide support online but they struggle to have effective conversations. In this paper, we work towards improving empathy in online mental health support conversations. We introduce empathic rewriting, a new task for transforming low-empathy conversations to higher empathy. We propose PARTNER, a deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to make sentence-level edits to conversations in order to increase the expressed level of empathy while maintaining conversation quality through specificity, fluency, and diversity.