Measuring What Matters!! Assessing Therapeutic Principles in Mental-Health Conversation

ArXi:2604.05795v1 Announce Type: new The increasing use of large language models in mental health applications calls for principled evaluation frameworks that assess alignment with psychotherapeutic best practices beyond surface-level fluency. While recent systems exhibit conversational competence, they lack structured mechanisms to evaluate adherence to core therapeutic principles. In this paper, we study the problem of evaluating AI-generated therapist-like responses for clinically grounded appropriateness and effectiveness.