mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support

arXiv 2106.01702 ↗First posted 3 Jun 2021cs.CLcited by 92

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Abstract (arXiv)

Great research interests have been attracted to devise AI services that are able to provide mental health support. However, the lack of corpora is a main obstacle to this research, particularly in Chinese language. In this paper, we propose PsyQA, a Chinese dataset of psychological health support in the form of question and answer pair. PsyQA is crawled from a Chinese mental health service platform, and contains 22K questions and 56K long and well-structured answers. Based on the psychological counseling theories, we annotate a portion of answer texts with typical strategies for providing support, and further present in-depth analysis of both lexical features and strategy patterns in the counseling answers. We also evaluate the performance of generating counseling answers with the generative pretrained models. Results show that utilizing strategies enhances the fluency and helpfulness of generated answers, but there is still a large space for future research.

Key facts. Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 13 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2021.

Builds on

13 of 39 references.

References · 13

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  5. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  6. 2020A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Supportcited by 182
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1 more
  1. 2019Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselorscited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 3; 2023: 16; 2024: 22; 2025: 26; 2026: 23.

92 papers.

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  1. 2023SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversationscited by 109
  2. 2024CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counselingcited by 88
  3. 2021On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmarkcited by 73
  4. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  5. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  6. 2024Cactus: Towards Psychological Counseling Conversations using Cognitive Behavioral Theorycited by 60
  7. 2025Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 47
  8. 2023SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Supportcited by 46
  9. 2024ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systemscited by 46
  10. 2024CBT-LLM: A Chinese Large Language Model for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-based Mental Health Question Answeringcited by 45
  11. 2023ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Supportcited by 44
  12. 2024Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactionscited by 43
38 more
  1. 2025MentalChat16K: A Benchmark Dataset for Conversational Mental Health Assistancecited by 38
  2. 2023Psy-LLM: Scaling up Global Mental Health Psychological Services with AI-based Large Language Modelscited by 36
  3. 2024Large Language Models in Mental Health Care: a Scoping Reviewcited by 34
  4. 2022EVA2.0: Investigating Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue Systems with Large-Scale Pre-Trainingcited by 31
  5. 2024PsychoGAT: A Novel Psychological Measurement Paradigm through Interactive Fiction Games with LLM Agentscited by 28
  6. 2024PsycoLLM: Enhancing LLM for Psychological Understanding and Evaluationcited by 26
  7. 2024SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agentcited by 24
  8. 2025RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agentscited by 24
  9. 2025From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversationscited by 23
  10. 2023Task-Adaptive Tokenization: Enhancing Long-Form Text Generation Efficacy in Mental Health and Beyondcited by 22
  11. 2021Exploring Prompt-based Few-shot Learning for Grounded Dialog Generationcited by 20
  12. 2025CounselBench: A Large-Scale Expert Evaluation and Adversarial Benchmarking of Large Language Models in Mental Health Question Answeringcited by 20
  13. 2025Human Decision-making is Susceptible to AI-driven Manipulationcited by 19
  14. 2025When Can We Trust LLMs in Mental Health? Large-Scale Benchmarks for Reliable LLM Evaluationcited by 19
  15. 2024MDD-5k: A New Diagnostic Conversation Dataset for Mental Disorders Synthesized via Neuro-Symbolic LLM Agentscited by 16
  16. 2024ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Modelscited by 15
  17. 2024Large Language Model for Mental Health: A Systematic Reviewcited by 14
  18. 2023PsyEval: A Suite of Mental Health Related Tasks for Evaluating Large Language Modelscited by 13
  19. 2023TPE: Towards Better Compositional Reasoning over Conceptual Tools with Multi-persona Collaborationcited by 11
  20. 2023PsyChat: A Client-Centric Dialogue System for Mental Health Supportcited by 11
  21. 2025Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversationscited by 11
  22. 2025Feel the Difference? A Comparative Analysis of Emotional Arcs in Real and LLM-Generated CBT Sessionscited by 11
  23. 2023Understanding Client Reactions in Online Mental Health Counselingcited by 9
  24. 2025MULTI-Bench: A Multi-Turn Interactive Benchmark for Assessing Emotional Intelligence ability of Spoken Dialogue Modelscited by 9
  25. 2026XInsight: Integrative Stage-Consistent Psychological Counseling Support Agents for Digital Well-Beingcited by 9
  26. 2024A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Mental Illnessescited by 7
  27. 2025SocialSim: Towards Socialized Simulation of Emotional Support Conversationcited by 7
  28. 2025MAGneT: Coordinated Multi-Agent Generation of Synthetic Multi-Turn Mental Health Counseling Sessionscited by 6
  29. 2024Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversationscited by 5
  30. 2025DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimizationcited by 5
  31. 2026PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Modelscited by 5
  32. 2022A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processingcited by 4
  33. 2024The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trendscited by 4
  34. 2024MentalQA: An Annotated Arabic Corpus for Questions and Answers of Mental Healthcarecited by 4
  35. 2025Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanishcited by 4
  36. 2025Exploring Safety Alignment Evaluation of LLMs in Chinese Mental Health Dialogues via LLM-as-Judgecited by 4
  37. 2023Dynamic Strategy Chain: Dynamic Zero-Shot CoT for Long Mental Health Support Generationcited by 3
  38. 2023K-ESConv: Knowledge Injection for Emotional Support Dialogue Systems via Prompt Learningcited by 3

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