Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2025): AUGUST | JTIE : Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering

A Therapist-Facing Session Copilot for Live Counseling Support: Reasoning-Guided Retrieval and Ranking from Multi-Turn Counseling Dialogues

Yifan Zhang (Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University)
Hailey Zhang (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA)



Article Info

Publish Date
25 Aug 2025

Abstract

This study develops and evaluates a retrieval-based therapist-facing session copilot for live counseling support using the public bilingual Psy-Insight dataset. Rather than providing autonomous psychotherapy or relying on a generative large language model (LLM), the system assists human therapists by ranking historical responses, retrieving interpretable rationales, and providing conservative contextual support. The reproducible pipeline combines TF-IDF representations, class-balanced LinearSVC routers, nearest-neighbor rationale retrieval, and label-aware response ranking without LLM fine-tuning. Experiments use all 520 English and 431 Chinese sessions (6,208 and 5,776 turns, respectively) with session-level train/dev/test splits. Psychotherapy routing achieves strong macro-F1 scores of 0.897 in English and 0.757 in Chinese, whereas strategy routing remains weak (0.253 and 0.268). Label-aware rationale retrieval improves ROUGE-L from 0.145 to 0.152 in English and from 0.142 to 0.151 in Chinese. The best response-ranking approach presents retrieved reasoning in parallel rather than through reasoning-fused reranking, increasing MRR from 0.498 to 0.541 in English and from 0.519 to 0.523 in Chinese while maintaining low latency (6.98–14.64 ms/query). These results demonstrate computational feasibility but do not establish therapeutic safety or clinical effectiveness.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jtie

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Power Engineering Telecommunication Engineering Computer Engineering Control and Computer Systems Electronics Information technology Informatics Data and Software engineering Biomedical ...