AVATAR Therapy Dialogue Corpus

AVATAR therapy is an innovative form of relational therapy for the treatment of distressing auditory verbal hallucinations, or voice-hearing. AVATAR therapy involves the creation of a digital simulation (‘avatar’) of an individual’s most prominent or distressing voice. The avatar is used in a series of three-way dialogues between participant, avatar, and therapist, in which an initially hostile avatar becomes increasingly conciliatory over time.

This paper introduces the Avatar Therapy Dialogues Corpus, a one-million-word specialised corpus containing orthographic transcriptions of AVATAR therapy session recordings collected from a multi-centre clinical trial. We offer an overview of the design and construction of the corpus, presenting a five-step semi-automated transcription process with a complete description of the processes and specialised tools created. We describe the transcription mark-up and conventions used, which were designed to capture para-linguistic and non-speech features which may have clinical relevance. We include some illustrative analysis of interlocutor turn count and length to highlight the value of a longitudinal dataset of therapeutic interactions. Finally, we discuss the potential value of the corpus for clinical research, existing as the first resource of its kind for the analysis and evaluation of the language of this unique therapeutic approach.