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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03913 |
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| _version_ | 1866908577104396288 |
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| author | Abbasi, Mohammad Amin Naderi, Hassan |
| author_facet | Abbasi, Mohammad Amin Naderi, Hassan |
| contents | This study presents PsychoLexTherapy, a framework for simulating psychotherapeutic reasoning in Persian using small language models (SLMs). The framework tackles the challenge of developing culturally grounded, therapeutically coherent dialogue systems with structured memory for multi-turn interactions in underrepresented languages. To ensure privacy and feasibility, PsychoLexTherapy is optimized for on-device deployment, enabling use without external servers. Development followed a three-stage process: (i) assessing SLMs psychological knowledge with PsychoLexEval; (ii) designing and implementing the reasoning-oriented PsychoLexTherapy framework; and (iii) constructing two evaluation datasets-PsychoLexQuery (real Persian user questions) and PsychoLexDialogue (hybrid simulated sessions)-to benchmark against multiple baselines. Experiments compared simple prompting, multi-agent debate, and structured therapeutic reasoning paths. Results showed that deliberate model selection balanced accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. On PsychoLexQuery, PsychoLexTherapy outperformed all baselines in automatic LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and was ranked highest by human evaluators in a single-turn preference study. In multi-turn tests with PsychoLexDialogue, the long-term memory module proved essential: while naive history concatenation caused incoherence and information loss, the full framework achieved the highest ratings in empathy, coherence, cultural fit, and personalization. Overall, PsychoLexTherapy establishes a practical, privacy-preserving, and culturally aligned foundation for Persian psychotherapy simulation, contributing novel datasets, a reproducible evaluation pipeline, and empirical insights into structured memory for therapeutic reasoning. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03913 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | PsycholexTherapy: Simulating Reasoning in Psychotherapy with Small Language Models in Persian Abbasi, Mohammad Amin Naderi, Hassan Computation and Language This study presents PsychoLexTherapy, a framework for simulating psychotherapeutic reasoning in Persian using small language models (SLMs). The framework tackles the challenge of developing culturally grounded, therapeutically coherent dialogue systems with structured memory for multi-turn interactions in underrepresented languages. To ensure privacy and feasibility, PsychoLexTherapy is optimized for on-device deployment, enabling use without external servers. Development followed a three-stage process: (i) assessing SLMs psychological knowledge with PsychoLexEval; (ii) designing and implementing the reasoning-oriented PsychoLexTherapy framework; and (iii) constructing two evaluation datasets-PsychoLexQuery (real Persian user questions) and PsychoLexDialogue (hybrid simulated sessions)-to benchmark against multiple baselines. Experiments compared simple prompting, multi-agent debate, and structured therapeutic reasoning paths. Results showed that deliberate model selection balanced accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. On PsychoLexQuery, PsychoLexTherapy outperformed all baselines in automatic LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and was ranked highest by human evaluators in a single-turn preference study. In multi-turn tests with PsychoLexDialogue, the long-term memory module proved essential: while naive history concatenation caused incoherence and information loss, the full framework achieved the highest ratings in empathy, coherence, cultural fit, and personalization. Overall, PsychoLexTherapy establishes a practical, privacy-preserving, and culturally aligned foundation for Persian psychotherapy simulation, contributing novel datasets, a reproducible evaluation pipeline, and empirical insights into structured memory for therapeutic reasoning. |
| title | PsycholexTherapy: Simulating Reasoning in Psychotherapy with Small Language Models in Persian |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03913 |