Papers by Kaleen Shrestha
Using Linguistic Entrainment to Evaluate Large Language Models for Use in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (2025.findings-naacl)
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Mina Kian, Kaleen Shrestha, Katrin Fischer, Xiaoyuan Zhu, Jonathan Ong, Aryan Trehan, Jessica Wang, Gloria Chang, Séb Arnold, Maja Mataric
| Challenge: | Entrainment is a communication process that builds a strong relationship between a mental health therapist and their client. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the linguistic entrainment of an LLM in a mental health dialog setting and compare it to trained therapists and non-expert online peer supporters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms humans in a cognitive behavioral therapy setting. |
Can Large Language Models Infer Human Actions and Motives? Evaluation in Social Prediction and Inspection Games (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Game theory provides a framework for studying human behaviors through incentivized games that simulate social situations. |
| Approach: | They used two validated games from the cognitive science literature to study how well several recent open- and closed-source LLMs predict player actions with underlying human motives. |
| Outcome: | The results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can achieve accuracy close to human levels in predicting players’ actions with underlying human motives in SPGs, but failed to recognize statistical patterns in players’ action. |
Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in socially complex, interaction-driven tasks, yet their ability to mirror human behavior in emotionally and strategically complex contexts remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They examine alignment of personality-prompted Large Language Models in conflict dialogues that incorporate negotiation by simulating a five-factor personality profile. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the closest alignment with humans in linguistic style and emotional dynamics while Claude-3.7-Sonnet best reflects strategic behavior. |