  Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to
achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding
in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has
expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of
counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into
reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system
with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first
creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not
relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the
template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict
fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover
effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original
content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method
against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in
turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while
achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.
