Building the avatar Therapy Dialogues Corpus: the process of constructing a longitudinal corpus of three-way psychotherapeutic interactions

avatar therapy is an innovative form of relational therapy for the treatment of distressing auditory verbal hallucinations, or voice-hearing, targeted at reducing voice-related distress. avatar therapy involves the creation of a digital simulation of a single voice, termed an ‘avatar’, which is used in a series of three-way therapeutic dialogues. This paper presents the avatar Therapy Dialogues Corpus, a specialised corpus containing orthographic transcriptions of avatar therapy sessions. We offer an overview of the corpus contents, and a detailed discussion of the design and construction of the corpus. We describe the processes and specialised tools created, transcription conventions, and mark-up designed to capture para-linguistic and non-speech features which may have clinical relevance. Finally, we discuss the potential of the corpus to provide a genuine innovation in clinical care, offering clinicians a data stream that could augment their understanding of patient experiences.