Review natural language processing applications and investigate bias issues in counselling and psychotherapy
department or school: Education, Faculty of
department or school: Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Laricheva, Maria
issued: 2023-04-18T15:26:30Z
issued: 2023
related degree: Master of Arts - MA
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: In the past two decades, researchers in counselling and psychotherapy have been increasingly applying natural language processing (NLP) methods to identify signs of mental illnesses in patients, assist counsellors with coding, and analyze the underlying processes in therapy. However, one of the challenges for applying NLP in counselling is how to prevent or minimize biases, such as racial or gender bias, introduced from training data or pretrained models. The biased results based on NLP research might lead to negative consequences for patients and counsellors, such as an inappropriate treatment plan. Unfortunately, this challenge has not been addressed in counselling research. In this thesis, I reviewed the common practice of NLP applications in counselling and psychotherapy and investigated the issue of gender bias in the counselling contexts. This thesis consists of two studies, which are presented in Chapters 2 and 3, separately. Chapter 2 is a scoping review of NLP applications for counselling and psychotherapy that utilize conversational data. This study summarized trends, strengths, and challenges in publications over the past three decades and examined the limitations and gaps of these publications, including bias issues. Chapter 3 investigated gender bias in an NLP model trained on historical counselling data. It compared two neural network models and proposed a new benchmark corpus for bias detection. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, our scoping review of NLP applications in counselling is the first study to summarize the methodological and bias issues. Given the consequential implications of bias, bias issues were not addressed appropriately in the counselling research, with a lack of discussion on the possibility of bias and the generalizability of the model’s results. This finding motivated our second study, in which we investigated how gender bias could be introduced by historical training data and explored how mask language modelling …
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/84232
note: REVIEW NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND INVESTIGATE BIAS ISSUES IN COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY by Maria Laricheva B.Sc., National Research University Higher School of Economics 2020 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Measurement, Evaluation, and Research Methodology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2023 © Maria Laricheva, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Review Natural Language Processing Applications and Investigate Bias Issues in Counselling and Psychotherapy submitted by Maria Laricheva in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology Examining Committee: Dr. Yan Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Carleton University Supervisor Dr. Amery Wu, Associate Professor, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, University of British Columbia Co-supervisor Dr. Vered Shwartz, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract In the past two decades, researchers in counselling and psychotherapy have been increasingly applying natural language processing (NLP) methods to identify signs of mental illnesses in patients, assist counsellors with coding, and analyze the underlying processes in therapy. However, one of the challenges for applying NLP in counselling is how to prevent or minimize biases, such as racial or gender bias, introduced from training data or pretrained models. The biased results based on NLP research might lead to negative consequences for patients and counsellors, such as an inappropriate treatment plan. Unfortunately, this challenge has not been addressed in counselling researc…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2023-05
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0431083
language: eng
degree discipline: Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Liu, Yan
contributor: Wu, Amery D.
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84232