Dialogue systems are increasingly integrated into mental health support to help clients facilitate exploration, gain insight, take action, and ultimately heal themselves. A practical and user-friendly dialogue system should be client-centric, focusing on the client's behaviors. However, existing dialogue systems publicly available for mental health support often concentrate solely on the counselor's strategies rather than the behaviors expressed by clients. This can lead to unreasonable or inappropriate counseling strategies and corresponding responses generated by the dialogue system. To address this issue, we propose PsyChat, a client-centric dialogue system that provides psychological support through online chat. The client-centric dialogue system comprises five modules: client behavior recognition, counselor strategy selection, input packer, response generator, and response selection. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed dialogue system for real-life mental health support. Furthermore, the case study demonstrates that the dialogue system can predict the client's behaviors, select appropriate counselor strategies, and generate accurate and suitable responses.

翻译：对话系统日益融入心理健康支持领域，旨在帮助来访者促进自我探索、获得洞察、采取行动并最终实现自我疗愈。一个实用且用户友好的对话系统应以来访者为中心，聚焦其行为表现。然而，现有公开可用的心理健康支持对话系统往往仅关注咨询师的策略，而非来访者的行为表达。这可能导致对话系统生成不合理或不当的咨询策略及对应回复。为解决此问题，我们提出PsyChat——一种以来访者为中心的对话系统，通过在线聊天提供心理支持。该对话系统包含五大模块：来访者行为识别、咨询师策略选择、输入封装器、回复生成器及回复筛选。自动评估与人工评估均表明，我们所提出的对话系统在现实心理健康支持中具有有效性与实用性。此外，案例研究进一步证明，该系统能预测来访者行为、选择恰当咨询策略，并生成准确合适的回复。