Dialogue systems are increasingly integrated into mental health support to
help clients facilitate exploration, gain insight, take action, and ultimately
heal themselves. For a dialogue system to be practical and user-friendly, it
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 the implementation of unreasonable or inappropriate
counseling strategies and corresponding responses from 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 intentionally fine-tuned to produce
responses, 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, we employ our proposed
dialogue system to simulate a real-world client-virtual-counselor interaction
scenario. The system is capable of predicting the client's behaviors, selecting
appropriate counselor strategies, and generating accurate and suitable
responses, as demonstrated in the scenario.

为了解决现有在线心理健康支持中仅关注咨询师策略而忽略客户表达的问题，本文提出了 PsyChat，这是一个以客户为中心的对话系统，通过在线聊天提供心理支持。该系统具有五个模块，分别是客户行为识别、咨询师策略选择、输入整合、经过专门微调以生成回复的回复生成器和回复选择。自动和人工评估验证了该对话系统在实际心理健康支持中的有效性和实用性。此外，我们还使用该对话系统模拟了真实的客户与虚拟咨询师的交互场景，证明了系统能够预测客户行为、选择适当的咨询师策略，并生成准确和合适的回应。