Scoping review on natural language processing applications in counselling and psychotherapy.

Recent years have witnessed some rapid and tremendous progress in natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to analyse text data. This study endeavours to offer an up‐to‐date review of NLP applications by examining their use in counselling and psychotherapy from 1990 to 2021. The pu...

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Publicado en:British Journal of Psychology Vol. 117; no. 2; pp. 677 - 702
Autores principales: Laricheva, Maria, Liu, Yan, Shi, Edward, Wu, Amery
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell May2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Scoping review on natural language processing applications in counselling and psychotherapy.
      aug:
        au:
          Laricheva, Maria
          Liu, Yan
          Shi, Edward
          Wu, Amery
        affil:
          Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver British Columbia,, Canada
          Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa Ontario,, Canada
          Arts, Business and Law, Victoria University Melbourne, Melbourne Victoria,, Australia
      su:
        Psychotherapy
        Classification of mental disorders
        Analysis of variance
        Counseling
        Psychological tests
        Effect sizes (Statistics)
        T-test (Statistics)
        Cluster analysis (Statistics)
        Questionnaires
        Kruskal-Wallis Test
        Logistic regression analysis
        Natural language processing
        Mann Whitney U Test
        Structural equation modeling
        Chi-squared test
        Descriptive statistics
        Research bias
        Systematic reviews
        MEDLINE
        Inferential statistics
        Online information services
        Data analysis software
        Psychology information storage & retrieval systems
        Regression analysis
        Evaluation
      sug:
        subj:
          Psychotherapy
          Classification of mental disorders
          Analysis of variance
          Counseling
          Psychological tests
          Other Individual and Family Services
          Effect sizes (Statistics)
          T-test (Statistics)
          Cluster analysis (Statistics)
          Questionnaires
          Kruskal-Wallis Test
          Logistic regression analysis
          Natural language processing
          Mann Whitney U Test
          Structural equation modeling
          Chi-squared test
          Descriptive statistics
          Research bias
          Systematic reviews
          MEDLINE
          Inferential statistics
          Online information services
          Data analysis software
          Psychology information storage & retrieval systems
          Regression analysis
          Evaluation
      keyword:
        bias
        counselling
        generalizability
        natural language processing
        psychotherapy
        scoping review
        bias
        counselling
        generalizability
        natural language processing
        psychotherapy
        scoping review
      ab: Recent years have witnessed some rapid and tremendous progress in natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to analyse text data. This study endeavours to offer an up‐to‐date review of NLP applications by examining their use in counselling and psychotherapy from 1990 to 2021. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify trends, advancements, challenges and limitations of these applications. Among the 41 papers included in this review, 4 primary study purposes were identified: (1) developing automated coding; (2) predicting outcomes; (3) monitoring counselling sessions; and (4) investigating language patterns. Our findings showed a growing trend in the number of papers utilizing advanced machine learning methods, particularly neural networks. Unfortunately, only a third of the articles addressed the issues of bias and generalizability. Our findings provided a timely systematic update, shedding light on concerns related to bias, generalizability and validity in the context of NLP applications in counselling and psychotherapy.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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