Risk-Aware Bilingual Spoken Dialogue for Campus Mental Health Support

Abstract

This work presented a web-based system which introduces an active-listening strategy in a spoken dialogue for self-disclosure to support mental health of a campus user. To enhance the system usability and safety, this demo is developed to conduct the bilingual (Mandarin/English) spoken dialogue where a high-risk dialogue detection during speech interaction is reliably augmented. In particular, a prompt-driven GPT classifier identifies the utterances indicating self-harm or suicide intent and triggers safety alerts with help center and counselor notification. We also integrate a TTS module for Taiwanese Mandarin and standard English, and redesign the user interface to automatically pop up alert messages when high-risk dialogue is detected. In addition, we collect speech data under diverse mental dialogue scenarios with bilingual speech to enable system analysis, evaluation and refinement. Overall, these extensions build a framework that promotes empathetic interactions, enables timely alert in critical cases, and improves the accessibility for diverse users.