PromptSense: Sentiment-Aware Mental Health Chatbot with Dynamic Prompting

Sugi Lee, Jianlong Zhou, Jing sUN

Current Large Language Models (LLMs)-based mental health chatbots often lack sufficient empathy, contextual awareness, and safety mechanisms, potentially leading to ineffective or harmful interactions. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates sentiment and depression analysis with a rule-based filtering mechanism prior to model inference. By dynamically constructing prompts based on emotional and risk-related insights, the framework aims to significantly improve the contextual relevance, empathy, and risk-aware of model-generated responses. We evaluated four model strategies and two prompt engineered variants across qualitative metrics such as empathy, helpfulness, clarity, relevance, safety, as well as toxicity assessments using the Perspective API. Experimental results indicate that the prompt engineering approaches outperforms DSFT and RLAIF by 1.8\% and 1.1\% respectively.