Mixed-Initiative Real-Time Topic Modeling & Visualization for Crisis Counseling

Text-based counseling and support systems have seen an in-creasing proliferation in the past decade. We present Fathom, a natural language interface to help crisis counselors on Crisis Text Line, a new 911-like crisis hotline that takes calls via text messaging rather than voice. Text messaging opens up the opportunity for software to read the messages as well as peo-ple, and to provide assistance for human counselors who give clients emotional and practical support. Crisis counseling is a tough job that requires dealing with emotionally stressed peo-ple in possibly life-critical situations, under time constraints. Fathom is a system that provides topic modeling of calls and graphical visualization of topic distributions, updated in real time. We develop a mixed-initiative paradigm to train co-herent topic and word distributions and use them to power real-time visualizations aimed at reducing counselor cogni-tive overload. We believe Fathom to be the first real-time computational framework to assist in crisis counseling