Adapting from Downturns: Prediction of Long-Term Conversational-Skill Development in Mental-Health Crisis Counselors
This study proposes a task to predict the development of long-term dialogue skills among volunteer counselors facing mental health crises, aiming to identify which counselors will improve their ability to guide conversations toward positive outcomes in the early stages. The core findings indicate that individuals may struggle at certain moments during conversations, and the way they adapt to these moments over time best predicts future improvement potential. The study identified the types of initial struggles experienced by counselors through designed methods, captured adaptive changes in response to similar situations during subsequent conversations, and learned to predict whether early adaptive characteristics will improve months or even years later. This method was verified in cases of volunteer crisis counselors, and its results were superior to those of the baseline model that learned directly from conversation transcripts.