Authors
Tessa Eagle, Conrad Blau, Sophie Bales, Noopur Desai, Victor Li, Steve Whittaker
Publication date
2022/7/20
Journal
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS)
Volume
12
Issue
2
Pages
1-23
Publisher
ACM
Description
Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly ubiquitous and are now commonly used to access medical information. However, we lack systematic data about the quality of advice such agents provide. This paper evaluates CA advice for mental health (MH) questions, a pressing issue given that we are undergoing a mental health crisis. Building on prior work, we define a new method to systematically evaluate mental health responses from CAs. We develop multi-utterance conversational probes derived from two widely used mental health diagnostic surveys, the PHQ-9 (Depression) and the GAD-7 (Anxiety). We evaluate the responses of two text-based chatbots and four voice assistants to determine whether CAs provide relevant responses and treatments. Evaluations were conducted both by clinicians and immersively by trained raters, yielding consistent results across all raters. Although advice and …
Total citations