  Current Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) provide counseling and
suggestive care. They refrain from patient diagnostic assistance because they
lack training in safety-constrained and specialized clinical process knowledge.
In this work, we define Proknow as an ordered set of information that maps to
evidence-based guidelines or categories of conceptual understanding to experts
in a domain. We also introduce a new dataset of diagnostic conversations guided
by safety constraints and Proknow that healthcare professionals use. We develop
a method for natural language question generation (NLG) that collects
diagnostic information from the patient interactively. We demonstrate the
limitations of using state-of-the-art large-scale language models (LMs) on this
dataset. Our algorithm models the process knowledge through explicitly modeling
safety, knowledge capture, and explainability. LMs augmented with ProKnow
guided method generated 89% safer questions in the depression and anxiety
domain. The Explainability of the generated question is assessed by computing
similarity with concepts in depression and anxiety knowledge bases. Overall,
irrespective of the type of LMs augmented with our ProKnow, we achieved an
average 82% improvement over simple pre-trained LMs on safety, explainability,
and process-guided question generation. We qualitatively and quantitatively
evaluate the efficacy of the proposed ProKnow-guided methods by introducing
three new evaluation metrics for safety, explainability, and process knowledge
adherence.
