NLP Resources for the Analysis of Patient/Therapist Interviews in Psychology

In recent years the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen a renew interest on the analysis of nonfactual, emotional discourse characterized by the presence of affective language and sentiments, and charged with subjectivity. One area which has not been properly investigated, however, is that of natural language processing in the field of psychology and more specifically to the analysis of interactions between patients and therapists. We are developing a set of NLP tools and resources for the analysis of interviews framed on a psychoanalytic theory and the work presented here is the first to investigate the application of NLP techniques for the automatic analysis of spoken transcriptions in Spanish (Argentinian variety) of psychoanalysis sessions between therapists and patients. The automatic analysis of the sessions which is used as a tool for psychoanalyst to assess and interpret are framed on Freudian theory developed by Libermann and extended by Maldavsky. The automatic tools to be presented here aim at recognizing a subset of Freudian drives manifested in both patient’s and therapist’s discourse. We are also investigation the applicability of the techniques to other discourses charged with subjectivity.