Project Title: Mental Health Chatbot

Objective:

To design and develop an AI-powered chatbot that provides mental health support through natural language conversations. The goal is to offer non-judgmental, anonymous assistance to users dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, or emotional distress, especially where access to traditional therapy is limited.

Key Components:

Natural Language Processing (NLP):

The chatbot uses NLP techniques to understand user inputs, detect emotional states, and generate empathetic and contextually appropriate responses.

Techniques like intent recognition, sentiment analysis, and entity extraction are applied.

Training Data:

Trained on mental health conversation datasets such as CounselChat, Mental Health Reddit posts, or simulated counseling transcripts.

Data preprocessing includes removing sensitive information, filtering toxic language, and normalizing text.

Emotion Detection:

Uses machine learning models or pre-trained transformers (like BERT) to detect user emotions such as sadness, anxiety, or anger based on input text.

This enables the chatbot to respond with sensitivity and relevance.

Dialogue Management:

A rule-based or ML-based dialogue system handles the flow of conversation.

Ensures the bot can switch contexts, ask follow-up questions, and suggest helpful activities or resources.

Response Generation:

Either retrieves responses from a curated database (retrieval-based) or generates new responses using models like GPT (generative-based).

Prioritizes empathetic tone, non-prescriptive advice, and encouraging language.

Safety and Escalation:

Includes safeguards for crisis situations, such as detecting suicidal ideation or severe distress.

Provides emergency contact resources or escalates to human professionals if needed.

Deployment:

Deployed via web app, mobile app, or messaging platforms (like WhatsApp or Telegram).

Includes user privacy features, chat history encryption, and optional anonymity.

Outcomes:

Provides 24/7 mental health support in a scalable, accessible way.

Encourages early intervention and emotional expression.

Offers resource suggestions (e.g., grounding exercises, meditation apps).

Not a replacement for professional therapy, but a complementary support tool.