Tagging Psychotherapeutic Interviews for Linguistic Analysis

A proposal is presented to create a tagsetfor linguistic features that constitute the meaningful elements to one particular theory of psychotherapeutic intervention, that is Grinder & Bandler' s Metamodel. These features include lexical, lexicogrammatical and semantic phenomena. It is proposed that determining the effectiveness of therapy could in some degree be automated by building an information system to automatically tag client interviews. An appraisal of the effectiveness of the computational processing, as well as the therapy, might be established by comparing some characterisation of client interviews before and after therapy based on the features of the Metamodel. Three 30 minute interviews for each of 10 clients are available, that is before and after group therapy sessions and 3-6 months later The prototype tagset is presented for appraisal. A hand analysis of some of the data gives prima facie justification for persuing this research. The appraisal of the effectiveness of psychotherapy has proven to be extremely difficult. Both process and outcome studies have provided incomplete evidence as to the effectiveness of therapy (Lambert & Hill, 1994). A recent review of the field states that not one out of hundreds of methods has been shown to be more effective than any other method, this includes the failure of psychotropic methods to be any better than "talk" therapies (Miller, Hubble, Duncan, 1995). This does not mean that therapy is not effective as it has been convincingly shown to be more effective than placebo and control groups. However the effectiveness of therapy has been asserted to be most highly correlated with four contributory factors; psyhcotherapeutic method 15%, therapeutic relationship 30%, client situation 40%, client expectancy 15%(Miller, Hubble, Duncan, 1995). With this backdrop it can be seen that any method that can contribute to understanding and assessing the nature of change in a client will benefit not only the psychotherapy profession as a whole, but other professions with outcomes that require learning by their clients. There are a great number of psychotherapy methods that dominantly require extensive conversational intercourse between therapist and client. Perhaps the most popularly known are psychodynamic, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy(CBT), and interpersonal therapies such as family therapy, narrative therapy, emotion-focussed therapy, solution-focussed therapy. Many of these therapies have developed a demand for linguistic analysis but with their strongest attention on the therapist's rhetoric and discourses. Their claims about client language fall more into the level of genre and ideology, that is the focus of the therapy is on varied aspects of the content not the lexicogrammatical structure of the language. The only method that has focussed dominantly on language structure has become known as Neurolinguistic Programming. It was originally proffered not as a therapy method but as a method of language analysis, called the Metamodel, suitable for use by practitioners of any therapeutic method. However with enhancements beyond its linguistic principles, it soon