S\'olo Esc\'uchame: Spanish Emotional Accompaniment Chatbot

TL;DR

This paper introduces Solo Escúchame, an open-source Spanish emotional support chatbot based on LLaMA-2-7b-Chat, along with a new dataset and evaluation metric, aiming to improve mental health assistance in Spanish.

Contribution

It presents the first open-source Spanish emotional support chatbot, the HEAR dataset from translated English sources, and a semi-automatic evaluation metric for psychological assistance models.

Findings

System outperforms state-of-the-art models in Spanish mental health support

HEAR dataset enables better training of emotional assistance models

Proposed evaluation metric provides reliable assessment of chatbot performance

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), suicide was the fourth leading cause of death in the world for individuals aged 15 to 29 in 2019. Given the rapid increase in mental health issues, providing psychological support is both crucial and urgent. In this paper: (1) we propose S\'olo Esc\'uchame, the first open-source Spanish emotional assistance chatbot, based on LLaMA-2-7b-Chat. (2) We introduced the HEAR (Hispanic Emotional Accompaniment Responses) dataset, compiled from multiple English sources translated into Spanish, as well as generic data generated using ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo. Finally, (3) we propose an evaluation metric based on two semi-automatic assessment methods. Our system outperforms a range of state-of-the-art models in providing psychological assistance in Spanish. Our models and datasets are publicly available to facilitate reproducibility.