From Patient Emotion Recognition to Provider Understanding: A Multimodal Data Mining Framework for Emotion-Aware Clinical Counseling Systems

Computational analysis of therapeutic communication presents challenges in multi-label classification, severe class imbalance, and heterogeneous multimodal data integration. We introduce a bidirectional analytical framework addressing patient emotion recognition and provider behavior analysis. For patient-side analysis, we employ ClinicalBERT on human-annotated CounselChat (1482 interactions, 25 categories, imbalance 60:1), achieving a macro-F1 of 0.74 through class weighting and threshold optimization, representing a six-fold improvement over naive baselines and 6–13 point improvement over modern imbalance methods. For provider-side analysis, we process 330 YouTube therapy sessions through automated pipelines (speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, temporal segmentation), yielding 14,086 annotated segments. Our architecture combines DeBERTa-v3-base with WavLM-base-plus through cross-modal attention mechanisms adapted from multimodal Transformer frameworks. On controlled human-annotated HOPE data (178 sessions, 12,500 utterances), the model achieves a macro-F1 of 0.91 with Cohen’s kappa of 0.87, comparable to inter-rater reliability reported in psychotherapy process research. On YouTube data, a macro-F1 of 0.71 demonstrates feasibility while highlighting annotation quality impacts. Cross-dataset transfer and systematic attention analyses validate domain-specific effectiveness and interpretability.