Natural speech Automated Utility for Mental health

促进精神健康是世界卫生组织《2013- 2020年精神卫生行动计划》的核心，特别强调预防精神疾病。事实上，预防长期以来一直被忽视：如果我们用牙科做类比，我们的心理健康状况是这样的：我们知道如何治疗龋齿，但我们还没有发现牙膏。尽管有研究表明，基于互联网的治疗可能是有益的，但在自动心理健康咨询系统方面进展甚微。在过去的十年里，机器学习对包括口语对话系统在内的各个领域产生了巨大的影响。然而，到目前为止，统计口语对话系统的应用仅限于简单的信息搜索任务。在这里，我们提出NAUM——自然语音自动实用程序心理健康——一个纯粹的数据驱动的口语对话系统，可用于维持心理健康。心理健康专家将致力于开发NAUM的知识，它的行为将通过新的强化学习算法进行优化，并将支持口头互动。这项突破性的研究将把机器学习在口语对话建模中的潜力带到一个对社会有明显好处的应用中。NAUM将提供匿名支持，任何人都可以在任何时间、任何地点免费访问。

Promotion of mental well-being is at the core of the World Health Organisation's action plan on mental health 2013--2020, with particular emphasis on the prevention of mental illnesses. Indeed, prevention has long been neglected: if we were to make an analogy with dentistry, the state in mental health is such that we know how to treat caries, but we have yet to discover toothpaste. Although there is research to suggest that internet-based therapy can be beneficial, there has been little progress on automated mental health advice systems. In the last decade, machine learning has made a huge impact on various areas including spoken dialogue systems. Still, the application of statistical spoken dialogue systems has so far been limited to simple information-seeking tasks. Here we propose NAUM---Natural speech Automated Utility for Mental health---, a purely data-driven spoken dialogue system that can be used for maintaining mental well-being. Mental health experts will work on developing NAUM's knowledge, its behaviour will be optimised by novel reinforcement learning algorithms and it will support spoken interaction. This ground breaking research will bring the potential of machine learning in spoken dialogue modelling to an application which has a clear benefit for society. NAUM will provide anonymous support that can be accessed by anyone, any time, anywhere, for free.