How to help someone feel better: NLP for mental health - The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group

Natural language processing (NLP) allows us to tag, parse, and even extract information from text. But we believe it also has the potential to help address major challenges facing the world. Recently, we have been working on applying NLP to a serious global health issue: mental illness. Fortunately, mental health conditions can often be treated with counseling and psychotherapy, and in recent years there has been rapid growth in the availability of these treatments thanks to technology-mediated counseling. The goal of our project was to better understand how to conduct counseling sessions, which we have done through a large-scale study of crisis counseling conversations.