Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning

We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes, Motivational Interviewing (MI). Addressing such a task requires a system that could infer how to motivate the user e ectively. We propose DIIR, a framework that is capable of learning and applying conversation strategies in the form of natural language inductive rules from expert demonstrations. Automatic and human evaluation on instruction-following large language models show natural language strategies descriptions discovered by DIIR can improve active listening skills, reduce unsolicited advice, and promote more collaborative and less authoritative conversations, outperforming in-context demonstrations that are over 50 times longer.