Malta

Depression is a global concern suffered by millions of people, significantly impacting their thoughts and behavior. Over the years, heightened awareness, spurred by health campaigns and other initiatives, has driven the study of this disorder using data collected from social media platforms. In our research, we aim to gauge the severity of symptoms related to depression among social media users. The ultimate goal is to estimate the user&#39;s responses to a well-known standardized psychological questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI). This is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory that covers multiple topics about how the subject has been feeling. Mining users&#39; social media interactions and understanding psychological states represents a challenging goal. To that end, we present here an approach based on search and summarization that extracts multiple BDI-biased summaries from the thread of users&#39; publications. We also leverage a robust large language model to estimate the potential answer for each BDI item. Our method involves several steps. First, we employ a search strategy based on sentence similarity to obtain pertinent extracts related to each topic in the BDI questionnaire. Next, we compile summaries of the content of these groups of extracts. Last, we exploit chatGPT to respond to the 21 BDI questions, using the summaries as contextual information in the prompt. Our model has undergone rigorous evaluation across various depression datasets, yielding encouraging results. The experimental report includes a comparison against an assessment done by expert humans and competes favorably with state-of-the-art methods.

EACL 2024

Delving into the Depths: Evaluating Depression Severity through BDI-biased Summaries

depression detection

large language models

Depression is a global concern suffered by millions of people, significantly impacting their thoughts and behavior. Over the years, heightened awareness, spurred by health campaigns and other initiatives, has driven the study of this disorder using data collected from social media platforms. In our research, we aim to gauge the severity of symptoms related to depression among social media users. The ultimate goal is to estimate the user's responses to a well-known standardized psychological questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI). This is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory that covers multiple topics about how the subject has been feeling. Mining users' social media interactions and understanding psychological states represents a challenging goal. To that end, we present here an approach based on search and summarization that extracts multiple BDI-biased summaries from the thread of users' publications. We also leverage a robust large language model to estimate the potential answer for each BDI item. Our method involves several steps. First, we employ a search strategy based on sentence similarity to obtain pertinent extracts related to each topic in the BDI questionnaire. Next, we compile summaries of the content of these groups of extracts. Last, we exploit chatGPT to respond to the 21 BDI questions, using the summaries as contextual information in the prompt. Our model has undergone rigorous evaluation across various depression datasets, yielding encouraging results. The experimental report includes a comparison against an assessment done by expert humans and competes favorably with state-of-the-art methods.

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Within Motivational Interviewing (MI), client utterances are coded as for or against a certain behaviour change, along with commitment strength; this is essential to ensure therapists soften rather than persisting goal-related actions in the face of resistance. Prior works in MI agents have been scripted or semi-scripted, limiting users' natural language expressions. With the aim of automating the MI interactions, we propose and explore the task of automated identification of client motivational language. Employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we compare in-context learning (ICL) and instruction fine-tuning (IFT) with varying training sizes for this identification task. Our experiments show that both approaches can learn under low-resourced settings. Our results demonstrate that IFT, though cheaper, is more stable to prompt choice, and yields better performance with more data. Given the detected motivation, we further present an approach to the analysis of therapists' strategies for balancing building rapport with clients with advancing the treatment plan. A framework of MI agents is developed using insights from the data and the psychotherapy literature.

How Can Client Motivational Language Inform Psychotherapy Agents?

Therapist Self-Disclosure (TSD) within the context of psychotherapy entails the revelation of personal information by the therapist. The ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the utility of TSD, spanning from the inception of psychotherapy to the present day, has underscored the need for greater specificity in conceptualizing TSD. This inquiry has yielded more refined classifications within the TSD domain, with a consensus emerging on the distinction between immediate and non-immediate TSD, each of which plays a distinct role in the therapeutic process. Despite this progress in the field of psychotherapy, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain currently lacks methodological solutions or explorations for such scenarios. This lacuna can be partly due to the difficulty of attaining publicly available clinical data. To address this gap, this paper presents an innovative NLP-based approach that formalizes TSD as an NLP task. The proposed methodology involves the creation of publicly available, expert-annotated test sets designed to simulate therapist utterances, and the employment of NLP techniques for evaluation purposes. By integrating insights from psychotherapy research with NLP methodologies, this study aims to catalyze advancements in both NLP and psychotherapy research.

Therapist Self-Disclosure as a Natural Language Processing Task

Objective: A thematic and topic modelling analysis of sleep concerns in a social media derived, privacy-preserving, suicidality dataset. This forms the basis for an exploration of sleep as a potential computational linguistic signal in suicide prevention. Background: Suicidal ideation is a limited signal for suicide. Developments in computational linguistics and mental health datasets afford an opportunity to investigate additional signals and to consider the broader clinical ethical design implications. Methodology: A clinician-led integration of reflexive thematic analysis, with machine learning topic modelling (Bertopic), and the purposeful sampling of the University of Maryland Suicidality Dataset. Results: Sleep as a place of refuge and escape, revitalisation for exhaustion, and risk and vulnerability were generated as core themes in an initial thematic analysis of 546 posts. Bertopic analysing 21,876 sleep references in 16791 posts facilitated the production of 40 topics that were clinically interpretable, relevant, and thematically aligned to a level that exceeded original expectations. Privacy and synthetic representative data, reproducibility, validity and stochastic variability of results, and a multi-signal formulation perspective, are highlighted as key research and clinical issues.

Ethical thematic and topic modelling analysis of sleep concerns in a social media derived suicidality dataset

In the field of dream research, the study of dream content typically relies on the analysis of verbal reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. This task is classically performed through manual scoring provided by trained annotators, at a great time expense. While a consistent body of work suggests that natural language processing (NLP) tools can support the automatic analysis of dream reports, proposed methods lacked the ability to reason over a report's full context and required extensive data pre-processing. Furthermore, in most cases, these methods were not validated against standard manual scoring approaches. In this work, we address these limitations by adopting large language models (LLMs) to study and replicate the manual annotation of dream reports, using a mixture of off-the-shelf and bespoke approaches, with a focus on references to reports' emotions. Our results show that the off-the-shelf method achieves a low performance probably in light of inherent linguistic differences between reports collected in different (groups of) individuals. On the other hand, the proposed bespoke text classification method achieves a high performance, which is robust against potential biases. Overall, these observations indicate that our approach could find application in the analysis of large dream datasets and may favour reproducibility and comparability of results across studies.

Automatic Annotation of Dream Report's Emotional Content with Large Language Models

Due to the rapid growth of user interaction on different social media platforms, publicly available social media data has increased substantially. The sheer amount of data and level of personal information being shared on such platforms has made analyzing textual information to predict mental disorders such as depression a reliable preliminary step when it comes to psychometrics. In this study, we first proposed a system to search for texts that are related to depression symptoms from the Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI) questionnaire, and providing a ranking for further investigation in a second step. Then, in this second step, we address the even more challenging task of automatic depression level detection, using writings and voluntary answers provided by users on Reddit. Several Large Language Models (LLMs) were applied in experiments. Our proposed system based on LLMs can generate both predictions and explanations for each question. By combining two LLMs for different questions, we achieved better performance on three of four metrics compared to the state-of-the-art and remained competitive on the one remaining metric. In addition, our system is explainable on two levels: first, knowing the answers to the BDI questions provides clues about the possible symptoms that could lead to a clinical diagnosis of depression; second, our system can explain the predicted answer for each question.

Explainable Depression Detection Using Large Language Models on Social Media Data

Automated depression estimation has received significant research attention in recent years as a result of its growing impact on the global community. Within the context of studies based on patient-therapist interview transcripts, most researchers treat the dyadic discourse as a sequence of unstructured sentences, thus ignoring the discourse structure within the learning process. In this paper we propose Multi-view architectures that divide the input transcript into patient and therapist views based on sentence type in an attempt to utilize symmetric discourse structure for improved model performance. Experiments on DAIC-WOZ dataset for binary classification task within depression estimation show advantages of Multi-view architecture over sequential input representations. Our model also outperforms the current state-of-the-art results and provide new SOTA performance on test set of DAIC-WOZ dataset.

Analysing relevance of Discourse Structure for Improved Mental Health Estimation

Analyses for linking language with psychological factors or behaviors predominately treat linguistic features as a static set, working with a single document per person or aggregating across multiple posts (e.g. on social media) into a single set of features. This limits language to mostly shed light on between-person differences rather than changes in behavior within-person. Here, we collected a novel dataset of daily surveys where participants were asked to describe their experienced well-being and report the number of alcoholic beverages they had within the past 24 hours. Through this data, we first build a multi-level forecasting model that is able to capture within-person change and leverage both the psychological features of the person and daily well-being responses. Then, we propose a longitudinal version of differential language analysis that finds patterns associated with drinking more (e.g. social events) and less (e.g. task-oriented), as well as distinguishing patterns of heavy drinks versus light drinkers.

Using Daily Language to Understand Drinking: Multi-Level Longitudinal Differential Language Analysis

Social anxiety represents a prevalent challenge in modern society, affecting individuals across personal and professional spheres. Left unaddressed, this condition can yield substantial negative consequences, impacting social interactions and performance. Further understanding its diverse physical and emotional symptoms becomes pivotal for comprehensive diagnosis and tailored therapeutic interventions. This study analyze prev lance and frequency of social anxiety symptoms taken from Mayo Clinic, exploring diverse human experiences from utilizing a large Reddit dataset dedicated to this issue. Leveraging these platforms, the research aims to extract insights and examine a spectrum of physical and emotional symptoms linked to social anxiety disorder. Upholding ethical considerations, the study maintains strict user anonymity within the dataset. By employing a novel approach, the research utilizes BART-based multi-label zero-shot classification to identify and measure symptom prevalence and significance in the form of probability score for each symptom under consideration. Results uncover distinctive patterns: "Trembling" emerges as a prevalent physical symptom, while emotional symptoms like "Fear of being judged negatively" exhibit high frequencies. These findings offer insights into the multifaceted nature of social anxiety, aiding clinical practices and interventions tailored to its diverse expressions.

Prevalent Frequency of Emotional and Physical Symptoms in Social Anxiety using Zero Shot Classification: An Observational Study

The recognition of mental health's crucial significance has led to a growing interest in utilizing social media text data in current research trends. However, there remains a significant gap in the study of panic and anxiety on these platforms, despite their high prevalence and severe impact. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a dataset consisting of 1,930 user posts from Quora and Reddit specifically focusing on panic and anxiety. Through a combination of lexical analysis, emotion detection, and writer attitude assessment, we explore the unique characteristics of each condition. To gain deeper insights, we employ a mental health-specific transformer model and a large language model for qualitative analysis. Our findings not only contribute to the understanding digital discourse on anxiety and panic but also provide valuable resources for the broader research community. We make our dataset, methodologies, and code available to advance understanding and facilitate future studies.

Comparing panic and anxiety on a dataset collected from social media

This paper addresses the quality of annotations in mental health datasets used for NLP-based depression level estimation from social media texts. While previous research relies on social media-based datasets annotated with binary categories, i.e. depressed or non-depressed, recent datasets such as D2S and PRIMATE aim for nuanced annotations using PHQ-9 symptoms. However, most of these datasets rely on crowd workers without the domain knowledge for annotation. Focusing on the PRIMATE dataset, our study reveals concerns regarding annotation validity, particularly for the lack of interest or pleasure symptom. Through reannotation by a mental health professional, we introduce finer labels and textual spans as evidence, identifying a notable number of false positives. Our refined annotations, to be released under a Data Use Agreement, offer a higher-quality test set for anhedonia detection. This study underscores the necessity of addressing annotation quality issues in mental health datasets, advocating for improved methodologies to enhance NLP model reliability in mental health assessments.

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Delving into the Depths: Evaluating Depression Severity through BDI-biased Summaries

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