Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedback

Millions of users come to online peer counseling platforms to seek support on diverse topics ranging from relationship stress to anxiety. However, studies show that online peer support groups are not always as effective as expected largely due to users' negative experiences with unhelpful counselors. Peer counselors are key to the success of online peer counseling platforms, but most of them often do not have systematic ways to receive guidelines or supervision. In this work, we introduce CARE: an interactive AI-based tool to empower peer counselors through automatic suggestion generation. During the practical training stage, CARE helps diagnose which specific counseling strategies are most suitable in the given context and provides tailored example responses as suggestions. Counselors can choose to select, modify, or ignore any suggestion before replying to the support seeker. Building upon the Motivational Interviewing framework, CARE utilizes large-scale counseling conversation data together with advanced natural language generation techniques to achieve these functionalities. We demonstrate the efficacy of CARE by performing both quantitative evaluations and qualitative user studies through simulated chats and semi-structured interviews. We also find that CARE especially helps novice counselors respond better in challenging situations.

Fairness Evaluation in Text Classification: Machine Learning Practitioner Perspectives of Individual and Group Fairness

Mitigating algorithmic bias is a critical task in the development and deployment of machine learning models. While several toolkits exist to aid machine learning practitioners in addressing fairness issues, little is known about the strategies practitioners employ to evaluate model fairness and what factors influence their assessment, particularly in the context of text classification. Two common approaches of evaluating the fairness of a model are group fairness and individual fairness. We run a study with Machine Learning practitioners (n=24) to understand the strategies used to evaluate models. Metrics presented to practitioners (group vs. individual fairness) impact which models they consider fair. Participants focused on risks associated with underpredicting/overpredicting and model sensitivity relative to identity token manipulations. We discover fairness assessment strategies involving personal experiences or how users form groups of identity tokens to test model fairness. We provide recommendations for interactive tools for evaluating fairness in text classification.

Slack Channels Ecology in Enterprises: How Employees Collaborate Through Group Chat

Despite the long history of studying instant messaging usage in organizations, we know very little about how today's people participate in group chat channels and interact with others. In this short note, we aim to update the existing knowledge on how group chat is used in the context of today's organizations. We have the privilege of collecting a total of 4300 publicly available group chat channels in Slack from an R\&D department in a multinational IT company. Through qualitative coding of 100 channels, we identified 9 channel categories such as project based channels and event channels. We further defined a feature metric with 21 features to depict the group communication style for these group chat channels, with which we successfully trained a machine learning model that can automatically classify a given group channel into one of the 9 categories. In addition, we illustrated how these communication metrics could be used for analyzing teams' collaboration activities. We focused on 117 project teams as we have their performance data, and further collected 54 out of the 117 teams' Slack group data and generated the communication style metrics for each of them. With these data, we are able to build a regression model to reveal the relationship between these group communication styles and one indicator of the project team performance.