  We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its
application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured
approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to
identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This
cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory
Observer-rated Shortened - a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and
relationship - which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this
work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the
spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We
have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call
sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been
annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have
investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items.
The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment, and
conversational descriptors extracted from the speech and language signals. Our
findings provide strong evidence that a subset of these features are strong
indicators of working alliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
and a novel study to exploit speech and language for characterising working
alliance.
