Stigma has emerged as one of the major obstacles to effectively diagnosing depression, as it prevents users from open conversations about their struggles. This requires advanced questioning skills to carefully probe the presence of specific symptoms in an unobtrusive manner. While recent efforts have been made on depression-diagnosis-oriented dialogue systems, they largely ignore this problem, ultimately hampering their practical utility. To this end, we propose a novel and effective method, UPSD$^{4}$, developing a series of strategies to promote a sense of unobtrusiveness within the dialogue system and assessing depression disorder by probing symptoms. We experimentally show that UPSD$^{4}$ demonstrates a significant improvement over current baselines, including unobtrusiveness evaluation of dialogue content and diagnostic accuracy. We believe our work contributes to developing more accessible and user-friendly tools for addressing the widespread need for depression diagnosis.

翻译：污名已成为有效诊断抑郁症的主要障碍之一，因为它阻碍用户公开谈论自身困境。这需要运用高级提问技巧，以无侵入性的方式谨慎探查特定症状的存在。尽管近期已有面向抑郁症诊断的对话系统研究，但大多忽视了该问题，最终限制了其实用性。为此，我们提出一种新颖有效的方法UPSD$^{4}$，通过开发一系列策略来提升对话系统的无侵入感知，并通过探查症状评估抑郁症。实验表明，UPSD$^{4}$在对话内容无侵入性评估和诊断准确性方面均显著优于现有基线模型。我们相信这项工作有助于开发更易用、更人性化的工具，以满足日益增长的抑郁症诊断需求。