Socratic Reasoning Improves Positive Text Rewriting

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Hauptverfasser: Goel, Anmol, Daheim, Nico, Montag, Christian, Gurevych, Iryna
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Goel, Anmol
Daheim, Nico
Montag, Christian
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Goel, Anmol
Daheim, Nico
Montag, Christian
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Reframing a negative into a positive thought is at the crux of several cognitive approaches to mental health and psychotherapy that could be made more accessible by large language model-based solutions. Such reframing is typically non-trivial and requires multiple rationalization steps to uncover the underlying issue of a negative thought and transform it to be more positive. However, this rationalization process is currently neglected by both datasets and models which reframe thoughts in one step. In this work, we address this gap by augmenting open-source datasets for positive text rewriting with synthetically-generated Socratic rationales using a novel framework called \textsc{SocraticReframe}. SocraticReframe uses a sequence of question-answer pairs to rationalize the thought rewriting process. We show that such Socratic rationales significantly improve positive text rewriting for different open-source LLMs according to both automatic and human evaluations guided by criteria from psychotherapy research. We validate our framework and the synthetic rationalizations with expert judgements from domain experts and psychology students in an IRB-approved annotation study. Our findings highlight the potential of utilizing the synergy between LLM reasoning and established psychotherapy techniques to build assistive solutions for reframing negative thoughts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_03029
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Socratic Reasoning Improves Positive Text Rewriting
Goel, Anmol
Daheim, Nico
Montag, Christian
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Reframing a negative into a positive thought is at the crux of several cognitive approaches to mental health and psychotherapy that could be made more accessible by large language model-based solutions. Such reframing is typically non-trivial and requires multiple rationalization steps to uncover the underlying issue of a negative thought and transform it to be more positive. However, this rationalization process is currently neglected by both datasets and models which reframe thoughts in one step. In this work, we address this gap by augmenting open-source datasets for positive text rewriting with synthetically-generated Socratic rationales using a novel framework called \textsc{SocraticReframe}. SocraticReframe uses a sequence of question-answer pairs to rationalize the thought rewriting process. We show that such Socratic rationales significantly improve positive text rewriting for different open-source LLMs according to both automatic and human evaluations guided by criteria from psychotherapy research. We validate our framework and the synthetic rationalizations with expert judgements from domain experts and psychology students in an IRB-approved annotation study. Our findings highlight the potential of utilizing the synergy between LLM reasoning and established psychotherapy techniques to build assistive solutions for reframing negative thoughts.
title Socratic Reasoning Improves Positive Text Rewriting
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03029