United States

Cognitive distortions (CDs) are systematically biased patterns of thinking associated with the onset and maintenance of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. Computational research on CDs has primarily focused on detection and classification, while the linguistic characterization of distorted language; what psycholinguistic features distinguish distorted from non-distorted text, and whether individual distortion types carry distinct language patterns, remains largely unexplored. Using a Reddit dataset, we apply a Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with bootstrap sampling to LIWC-derived features and find that CD language is psycholinguistically distinct from non-distorted language. We further characterize type-specific psycholinguistic profiles for each CD, and through hierarchical clustering show that CD types are not fully separable, with certain distortions sharing stable linguistic signatures. Together, these findings contribute to the linguistic characterization of CDs, offering an empirically grounded account of the psycholinguistic properties that distinguish distorted language at the level of CDs as a whole and across specific distortion types.

ACL 2026

Psycholinguistic Profiles of Cognitive Distortions in Reddit Data

linguistic markers/profiles

cognitive distortion

mental health

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

workshop paper

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Speech monologues recorded in naturalistic settings provide opportunities to characterize mental illness phenomenology and detect symptom exacerbation. Large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for automating this process, as they require annotated data primarily for evaluation rather than training. In this paper, we present a novel automated, multi-agent LLM pipeline for the fine-grained, multi-label extraction of language suggestive of delusional beliefs, associated affective responses, and behavioral responses from transcripts of naturalistic audio diaries collected from people with moderate persecutory ideation. Evaluating an ensemble of three foundation models, we demonstrate that detailed diagnostic prompt instructions successfully reduce false positives for delusional theme classification, but also constrain the interpretation of affective or behavioral responses. Furthermore, comparing multi-agent adjudication frameworks shows that complex conversational debate between agents diminishes accuracy on clinically ambiguous text by inducing premature consensus. Instead, majority voting establishes robust performance (Micro F1 of 0.872 and 0.779 for delusion detection and classification respectively). This work provides a validated and scalable pipeline for the automated detection and characterization of content suggesting delusional beliefs in naturalistic speech.

Automated Detection and Classification of Delusion-related Content in Naturalistic Audio Diaries Using Multi-Agent Language Models

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Enhancing Mental Health Counseling Support in Bangladesh using Culturally-grounded Knowledge

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When Rating Scales Fall Short: LLM-Assisted Discovery of ADHD Signals in Turkish Teacher Narratives

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Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities

As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on clinical benchmarks, it remains unclear whether this reflects true patient-specific reasoning or reliance on generalized symptom patterns. To address this question, we evaluate LLMs on a counseling competency benchmark to assess their use of patient-specific contextual information. Through controlled experiments with contextual ablations, role framing, Thread-of-Thought (ThoT) prompting, and input perturbations, we find that removing contextual details results in only modest performance drops, and predictions remain relatively stable under input variations. Error analysis further reveals systematic patterns where models favor general clinical associations over context-specific cues, even when such cues are correctly identified during intermediate reasoning. Our findings suggest that achieving passing-level performance may not reflect robust context-sensitive decision-making, revealing a potential gap between benchmark-level clinical competence and reliable utilization of patient-specific contextual information. These results highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that more directly assess context integration in mental health applications.

On the Role of Context in LLM Alignment to Mental Health Counseling Competencies

When large language models simulate patients or clients, they tend to produce cooperative dialogue, premature emotional insight, and rapid resolution. These defaults undermine clinical training, where the pedagogical value lies in sustained difficulty. We describe Clinical Prompt Engineering (CPE), a methodology developed by a multidisciplinary team of clinician-researchers and prompt engineering experts within the [ProjectName] project. CPE encodes clinical knowledge directly into prompt design: each simulated character is constructed through layered psychological profiles, explicit contingency rules linking interactional events to internal states, and enforced non-linear emotional trajectories that resist the model's pull toward resolution. The methodology has been applied across several clinical training simulations involving over 300 participants in formal studies and iterative pilot phases. Each simulated character is embedded within a multi-agent training environment that provides real-time reflective guidance during the interaction and structured, clinically informed feedback afterward. We illustrate the approach through Talking with Lia, a Hebrew-language simulation in which parents practice responding to a seven-year-old child during repeated missile alerts and forced sheltering. The simulation was deployed within the first week of an acute security crisis in Israel in Winter 2026. Of 132 sessions initiated organically through professional networks, 42 were completed; qualitative feedback emphasized the simulation's difficulty as pedagogically meaningful. Because CPE operates at the level of prompt design, it can be developed by clinician-researcher teams and adapted to new populations, developmental stages, and crisis contexts, potentially extending access to expert-informed training beyond the settings where such expertise is typically available. Where much computational work in clinical psychology has focused on classifying mental health states from text, CPE addresses a complementary task: whether clinicians can respond effectively to those states as they shift in real time. The next step is testing whether the skills practiced in simulation transfer to real interactions.

Clinical Prompt Engineering: Encoding Clinical Knowledge into AI Training Simulations - A Crisis Deployment Case Study

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automatic personality assessment, yet most prior work relies on coarse binary labels and direct domain-level predictions, limiting interpretability and ignoring the hierarchical facet structure of personality. In this study, we implement a structured prompting approach with three complementary objectives: direct domain-level prediction, fine-grained facet-level prediction, and domain-level prediction informed by facet outputs. All predictions use a five-level ordinal label scheme, capturing a continuum from very low to very high trait expression. Across all prompt types, we adopt an error-guided self-refinement procedure using in-context learning (ICL) to guide the model toward more accurate predictions. Zero-shot prompts assess baseline performance, while one-shot prompts incorporate a single demonstration example selected through the refinement procedure. Our framework evaluates both domain- and facet-level predictions, enabling examination of how prediction granularity and targeted exemplar selection influence LLM inference. By combining hierarchical domain-facet relationships with structured prompting and refinement, this work aims to provide a systematic approach for interpretable and principled LLM-based personality assessment from long-form life narratives.

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Discriminant Validity: Disentangling Health and Emotional Constructs from Language-Based Assessments

Cognitive distortions, distorted patterns of thinking, have been increasingly studied in computational mental health research. Although they are related to many, if not all, mental health disorders, most existing studies focus primarily on depression. In this work, we explore distortion profiles across multiple mental health conditions. We analyzed a large Reddit-based dataset containing posts from nine self-reported mental health groups as well as a control group using both an n-gram-based method and a fine-tuned transformer model for detecting cognitive distortions. Mental health groups, both when pooled together and when examined individually, showed higher prevalence of cognitive distortions compared to the control group, with the effect sizes ranging from small to moderate. When comparing distortion profiles across conditions, we observed largely similar patterns, although some groups exhibited overall higher levels of distortions than others. These findings suggest that relatively simple lexical approaches can be useful for exploratory analyses of group-level trends in large-scale mental health text data.

Exploring Profiles of Cognitive Distortions Associated with Mental Health Disorders

Person-level psychological assessment requires aggregating meaning across many messages from the same individual, a task that document-level training objectives were not explicitly designed for. 
We present a systematic, empirical comparison between architecturally matched traditional (a) base-transformers and (b) document-tuned-transformers (further contrastively fine-tuned at the document-level, sometimes referred to as "sentence transformers") under otherwise identical conditions. 
Comparing layer-wise and overall performance across two longitudinal mental health and psychological datasets, 
we find document-tuned models demonstrated a consistent improvement over base representations (increase in Pearson r of 13.4%, p=.015). 
Robustness analyses revealed document-tuned models remained more accurate under perturbations to word deletion, synonym replacement, typo injection, and back translation. 
Further, hedged language (e.g., 'usually') was more characteristic of outcomes in document-tuned embeddings while abundance (e.g., 'lot') was more characteristic of base-transformers, suggesting document-tuned models may better capture uncertainty.
These results suggest representation choice impacts mental health prediction, document-tuned models often being more adept.

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