In this experiment, a model was devised, trained, and evaluated to automate psychotherapist/client text conversations through the use of state-of-the-art, Seq2Seq Transformer-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Through training the model upon a mix of the Cornell Movie Dialogue Corpus for language understanding and an open-source, anonymized, and public licensed psychotherapeutic dataset, the model achieved statistically significant performance in published, standardized qualitative benchmarks against human-written validation data - meeting or exceeding human-written responses’ performance in 59.7% and 67.1% of the test set for two independent test methods respectively. Although the model cannot replace the work of psychotherapists entirely, its ability to synthesize human-appearing utterances for the majority of the test set serves as a promising step towards communizing and easing stigma at the psychotherapeutic point-of-care.

Instead of calculating:

\begin{equation} \qty( \frac{52! -1}{52!} ) \end{equation}

We calculate the log of it because then you are able to write:

\begin{equation} \log \qty( \frac{52! -1}{52!} ) = \log (52! - 1) - \log(52!) \end{equation}

which won’t be rounded to \(0\).

Requirements Analysis is how to satisfy your persnickety users while keeping your fucking app simple.

Goal

The broad goal of Requirements Analysis is to come up with a spec that is:

1. Documented
2. Actionable
3. Measurable
4. Testable
5. Traceable
6. Defined with details
7. Satisfies business goals

Timing

Requirements Analysis should be performed when

• Calculating costs
• Setting priorities
• Creating breakdowns
• Including specialists

Steps

1. Gather requirements by doing User Interviews
2. Analyze the requirements for clarity, completeness, consistency, and lack of conflicts
3. Write them down and implement them

Tools

Gap Analysis

Analyze the difference between where the business is at and its stated goals; figure out how the goals can be closed.

Learning to ask questions in a reasonable way. Changing you from a consumer of knowledge to a producer of researcher.

The Why of Research from Brian Thomas

• Your discipline is not your topic
• You should do research to find out whether or not you have chosen the right area of focus
• You can interact with faculty in a new way: everyone is here because of fantastic scholarship; you are mining a completely novel area of their expertise
• Research is the act of taming unruly problems