Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.

翻译：反思性倾听是咨询师在掌握动机性访谈（MI）技能时必须具备的基础能力，它要求咨询师以认可并探索来访者在对话中所表达内容意义的方式作出回应。本研究提出咨询回应改写任务，旨在将非反思性陈述转化为反思性回应。我们引入VERVE系统，这是一种结合了释义增强训练与自适应模板更新的基于模板的改写系统。VERVE首先通过识别并过滤与反思无关的标记来创建模板，继而利用该模板构建反思性回应。释义增强训练使模型能够学习对掩码段进行更灵活填充，而自适应模板更新则有助于发现既能有效改写又不过度删改原始内容的模板。通过自动评估与人工评估，我们将所提方法与文本改写基线进行了对比，结果表明本框架能有效将非反思性陈述转化为更具反思性的回应，同时在内容保留与反思风格之间实现良好平衡。