aiqbench analysis
This study empirically demonstrates that while current commercial LLMs can generate minimal responses when prompted, they lack the contextual judgment to deploy them appropriately in counseling scenarios where brevity is interactionally vital. The research highlights a critical gap between human conversational norms and AI behavior, revealing that models trained on synthetic data often fail to replicate the nuanced use of backchannel cues found in real-world datasets. For AI researchers, this underscores the need for evaluation frameworks that value interactional appropriateness over mere content richness when assessing dialogue systems for sensitive applications.
When Less Is More: An Empirical Study of Minimal Responses in Counseling Dialogues and the Behavior of LLMs
arXiv:2608.24080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In psychological counseling, effective support is not always delivered through long, information-rich responses. Minimal responses, such as backchannel cues and concise empathic statements, help convey attentive listening, express empathy, and encourage clients to continue expressing themselves. However, existing counseling dialogue systems and evaluation frameworks often favor explicit, content-rich replies, overlooking the interactional value of brief counselor utterances. This paper presents a systematic cross-lingual analysis of minimal responses across multiple counseling dialogue datasets. We develop a two-stage filtering method based on utterance length and content, followed by contextual verification using a large language model (LLM). Our analysis shows that minimal responses are common in human-collected datasets but substantially underrepresented in LLM-generated ones. We further evaluate current LLMs in manually curated dialogue contexts where human counselors used minimal responses. The results show that strong commercial LLMs are capable of generating minimal responses when explicitly instructed, but still struggle to determine when such responses are appropriate. Counseling-specific models trained on synthetic data perform particularly poorly, tending instead to produce longer and more information-rich responses. Moreover, LLM-based response-quality evaluation may undervalue minimal responses, even when they are interactionally appropriate.
Abstract:In psychological counseling, effective support is not always delivered through long, information-rich responses. Minimal responses, such as backchannel cues and concise empathic statements, help convey attentive listening, express empathy, and encourage clients to continue expressing themselves. However, existing counseling dialogue systems and evaluation frameworks often favor explicit, content-rich replies, overlooking the interactional value of brief counselor utterances. This paper presents a systematic cross-lingual analysis of minimal responses across multiple counseling dialogue datasets. We develop a two-stage filtering method based on utterance length and content, followed by contextual verification using a large language model (LLM). Our analysis shows that minimal responses are common in human-collected datasets but substantially underrepresented in LLM-generated ones. We further evaluate current LLMs in manually curated dialogue contexts where human counselors used minimal responses. The results show that strong commercial LLMs are capable of generating minimal responses when explicitly instructed, but still struggle to determine when such responses are appropriate. Counseling-specific models trained on synthetic data perform particularly poorly, tending instead to produce longer and more information-rich responses. Moreover, LLM-based response-quality evaluation may undervalue minimal responses, even when they are interactionally appropriate.
Camera-ready version. Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2608.24080 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.24080v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24080 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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