Language Carries the Expert's Impression: Instrument-Anchored LLM Judges Transfer Counseling-Quality Assessment and Beat In-Domain Training
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.08055 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Oct 2026]
Title:Language Carries the Expert's Impression: Instrument-Anchored LLM Judges Transfer Counseling-Quality Assessment and Beat In-Domain Training
View a PDF of the paper titled Language Carries the Expert's Impression: Instrument-Anchored LLM Judges Transfer Counseling-Quality Assessment and Beat In-Domain Training, by Tobias Hallmen and 1 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Automatic assessment of communication quality in dyadic counseling conversations is bottlenecked by data: expert-rated corpora are small and expensive to grow. We study cross-domain transfer of expert overall-impression prediction across three German corpora of simulated counseling (two general-practice medical, one school-related parent-teacher; $n=195$ expert-rated sessions, one corpus after scale equating). Training on the other domains beats training in-domain: leave-one-domain-out transfer reaches nested Spearman $\rho = 0.54$ against $\le 0.48$ within the target domain, a paired session-level gap of $+0.15$ that holds at $+0.12$ when the training-set sizes are matched, so it is not simply data volume. The decisive features are session-level construct scores from small open-weight LLMs reading the two-speaker transcript, with the constructs largely derived from the experts' rating instruments: the instrument-derived battery lifts a single judge from $0.32$ to $0.41$ over generic dialogue qualities, judges from three model families ensemble to $0.51$ language-only, and a nonverbal-dyadic block adds $+0.03$ more, not separable from noise at this sample size. We also price the recording setup: one corpus lost its per-speaker audio, 16% of its diarised segments carry the wrong speaker, and repair is worth $+0.07$ there. At practically attainable corpus sizes, the expert's overall impression is carried by what is said, and by other communication programs' data more than by one's own.
| Comments: | Preprint. 25 pages, 2 figures |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.08055 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.08055v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08055
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled Language Carries the Expert's Impression: Instrument-Anchored LLM Judges Transfer Counseling-Quality Assessment and Beat In-Domain Training, by Tobias Hallmen and 1 other authors
Additional Features
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.