Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish
Aylin Ece Gunal, Bowen Yi, John D. Piette, Rada Mihalcea, Veronica Perez-Rosas
Abstract
Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{gunal-etal-2025-examining,
title = "Examining {S}panish Counseling with {MIDAS}: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in {S}panish",
author = "Gunal, Aylin Ece and
Yi, Bowen and
Piette, John D. and
Mihalcea, Rada and
Perez-Rosas, Veronica",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-short.73/",
pages = "866--872",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-190-2"
}