Paper Detail
Afonso Baldo, Hugo Pitorro, Areti Vassilopoulos, Anabela C. Areias, Maya D'Eon, Fabíola Costa, Ricardo Rei, Nuno M. Guerreiro
Users increasingly turn to large language models for emotional support, yet little is known about how these models actually conduct a psychotherapy interaction. We introduce an ontology of ten therapeutic moves: compact, function-based categories grounded in the MULTI-60 inventory, validated through an annotation campaign with five licensed psychologists, and scaled with a judge-based approach that matches expert agreement. Applying it to real counseling transcripts and model-led sessions, we compare the move distributions between human clinicians and a panel of frontier models. Models over-use inquiry at up to three times the human rate, neglect psychoeducation, and are strongly context-anchored: they carry forward strategies initiated by a human clinician but rarely initiate them themselves. Exposing the ontology as a set of tools roughly halves the mean deviation from the human move distribution and improves turn-level alignment with human therapist by 7-9 percentage points, without any fine-tuning.
No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.
No ranking explanation is available yet.
No tags.
@article{baldo2026move,
title = {Move by Move: Measuring and Steering How LLMs Conduct Psychotherapy},
author = {Afonso Baldo and Hugo Pitorro and Areti Vassilopoulos and Anabela C. Areias and Maya D'Eon and Fabíola Costa and Ricardo Rei and Nuno M. Guerreiro},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Users increasingly turn to large language models for emotional support, yet little is known about how these models actually conduct a psychotherapy interaction. We introduce an ontology of ten therapeutic moves: compact, function-based categories grounded in the MULTI-60 inventory, validated through an annotation campaign with five licensed psychologists, and scaled with a judge-based approach that matches expert agreement. Applying it to real counseling transcripts and model-led sessions, we co},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21325},
keywords = {cs.CL},
eprint = {2608.21325},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}