When Less Is More: An Empirical Study of Minimal Responses in Counseling Dialogues and the Behavior of LLMs
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 con...
| Authors | Zhiyang Qi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 August 2026 |
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