# Enhancing Psychotherapy Counseling: A Data Augmentation Pipeline Leveraging Large Language Models for Counseling Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08718 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08718/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [AugGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Text Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13007/) (2023)
- [SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00273/) (2023)
- [AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13047/) (2022)
- [ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15461/) (2023)
- [Benefits and Harms of Large Language Models in Digital Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14693/) (2023)
- [Psy-LLM: Scaling up Global Mental Health Psychological Services with AI-based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11991/) (2023)
- [Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning for Dialogue-act Classification in Counselling Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06647/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Psychological Counseling with Large Language Model: A Multifaceted Decision-Support System for Non-Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15192/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11958/) (2024)
- [Counseling Summarization using Mental Health Knowledge Guided Utterance Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03886/) (2022)
- [Challenges of Large Language Models for Mental Health Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13857/) (2023)
- [Towards Healthy AI: Large Language Models Need Therapists Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00416/) (2023)
- [PsyChat: A Client-Centric Dialogue System for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04262/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models be Used to Provide Psychological Counselling? An Analysis of GPT-4-Generated Responses Using Role-play Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12738/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18412/) (2025)
- [How Real Are Synthetic Therapy Conversations? Evaluating Fidelity in Prolonged Exposure Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21800/) (2025)
- [HamRaz: A Culture-Based Persian Conversation Dataset for Person-Centered Therapy Using LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05982/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform single-turn psychotherapy counseling sessions into multi-turn interactions. While AI-supported online counseling services for individuals with mental disorders exist, they are often constrained by the limited availability of multi-turn training datasets and frequently fail to fully utilize therapists' expertise. Our proposed pipeline effectively addresses these limitations. The pipeline comprises two main steps: 1) Information Extraction and 2) Multi-turn Counseling Generation. Each step is meticulously designed to extract and generate comprehensive multi-turn counseling conversations from the available datasets. Experimental results from both zero-shot and few-shot generation scenarios demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the ability of LLMs to produce higher quality multi-turn dialogues in the context of mental health counseling. Our pipeline and dataset are publicly available https://github.com/jwkim-chat/A-Data-Augmentation-Pipeline-Leveraging-Large-Language-Models-for-Counseling-Conversations.