Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish

TL;DR

This paper introduces MIDAS, a Spanish counseling dataset with annotations, to explore language-based differences in counselor behavior and develop classifiers for behavioral coding, addressing a gap in multilingual NLP research.

Contribution

It presents the first Spanish counseling dataset with expert annotations and demonstrates its use in analyzing language differences and building classifiers for counselor behavior.

Findings

Language-based differences in counselor reflections and questions identified

Classifiers successfully distinguish counselor behaviors in Spanish and English

Multilingual models improve behavioral coding accuracy

Abstract

Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.