Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schmidt, Fabian, Hammerfald, Karin, Jahren, Henrik Haaland, Vlassov, Vladimir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22277
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913918563123200
author Schmidt, Fabian
Hammerfald, Karin
Jahren, Henrik Haaland
Vlassov, Vladimir
author_facet Schmidt, Fabian
Hammerfald, Karin
Jahren, Henrik Haaland
Vlassov, Vladimir
contents Common factors and microcounseling skills are critical to the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Understanding and measuring these elements provides valuable insights into therapeutic processes and outcomes. However, automatic identification of these change principles from textual data remains challenging due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of therapeutic dialogue. This paper introduces CFiCS, a hierarchical classification framework integrating graph machine learning with pretrained contextual embeddings. We represent common factors, intervention concepts, and microcounseling skills as a heterogeneous graph, where textual information from ClinicalBERT enriches each node. This structure captures both the hierarchical relationships (e.g., skill-level nodes linking to broad factors) and the semantic properties of therapeutic concepts. By leveraging graph neural networks, CFiCS learns inductive node embeddings that generalize to unseen text samples lacking explicit connections. Our results demonstrate that integrating ClinicalBERT node features and graph structure significantly improves classification performance, especially in fine-grained skill prediction. CFiCS achieves substantial gains in both micro and macro F1 scores across all tasks compared to baselines, including random forests, BERT-based multi-task models, and graph-based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22277
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CFiCS: Graph-Based Classification of Common Factors and Microcounseling Skills
Schmidt, Fabian
Hammerfald, Karin
Jahren, Henrik Haaland
Vlassov, Vladimir
Computation and Language
Common factors and microcounseling skills are critical to the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Understanding and measuring these elements provides valuable insights into therapeutic processes and outcomes. However, automatic identification of these change principles from textual data remains challenging due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of therapeutic dialogue. This paper introduces CFiCS, a hierarchical classification framework integrating graph machine learning with pretrained contextual embeddings. We represent common factors, intervention concepts, and microcounseling skills as a heterogeneous graph, where textual information from ClinicalBERT enriches each node. This structure captures both the hierarchical relationships (e.g., skill-level nodes linking to broad factors) and the semantic properties of therapeutic concepts. By leveraging graph neural networks, CFiCS learns inductive node embeddings that generalize to unseen text samples lacking explicit connections. Our results demonstrate that integrating ClinicalBERT node features and graph structure significantly improves classification performance, especially in fine-grained skill prediction. CFiCS achieves substantial gains in both micro and macro F1 scores across all tasks compared to baselines, including random forests, BERT-based multi-task models, and graph-based methods.
title CFiCS: Graph-Based Classification of Common Factors and Microcounseling Skills
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22277