Understanding the conversation abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can help lead to its more cautious and appropriate deployment. This is especially important for safety-critical domains like mental health, where someone's life may depend on the exact wording of a response to an urgent question. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for evaluating the nuanced conversation abilities of LLMs. Within it, we develop a series of quantitative metrics developed from literature on using psychotherapy conversation analysis literature. While we ensure that our framework and metrics are transferable by researchers to relevant adjacent domains, we apply them to the mental health field. We use our framework to evaluate several popular frontier LLMs, including some GPT and Llama models, through a verified mental health dataset. Our results show that GPT4 Turbo can perform significantly more similarly to verified therapists than other selected LLMs. We conduct additional analysis to examine how LLM conversation performance varies across specific mental health topics. Our results indicate that GPT4 Turbo performs well in achieving high correlation with verified therapists in particular topics such as Parenting and Relationships. We believe our contributions will help researchers develop better LLMs that, in turn, will more positively support people's lives.

我们提出了一个新颖的框架来评估大型语言模型（LLMs）的细致对话能力，将其应用于心理健康领域，并发现GPT4 Turbo在特定主题上表现出与经过验证的治疗师高度相关的成绩，从而帮助研究人员开发更好的LLMs以更积极地支持人们的生活。

一个用于心理健康中大型语言模型的新颖细致对话评估框架