United States

Evidence has demonstrated the presence of similarities in language use across people with various mental health conditions. In this work, we investigate these relationships both as described in literature and as a data analysis problem. We also introduce a novel transfer learning-based approach that learns from linguistic feature spaces of previous conditions and predicts unknown ones. Our model achieves strong performance, with F\textsubscript{1} scores of 0.75, 0.80, and 0.76 at detecting depression, stress, and suicidal ideation in a first-of-its-kind transfer task and offering promising evidence that language models can harness learned patterns from known mental health conditions to aid in their prediction of others that may lie latent.

NAACL 2022

Are You Really Okay? A Transfer Learning-based Approach for Identification of Underlying Mental Illnesses

feature spaces

mental health

transfer learning

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

Models of mental health based on natural lan- guage processing can uncover latent signals of mental health from language. Models that in- dicate whether an individual is depressed, or has other mental health conditions, can aid in diagnosis and treatment. A critical aspect of integration of these models into the clinical setting relies on explaining their behavior to domain experts. In the case of mental health diagnosis, clinicians already rely on an assess- ment framework to make these decisions; that framework can help a model generate meaning- ful explanations.
In this work we propose to use PHQ-9 cate- gories as an auxiliary task to explaining a social media based model of depression. We develop a multi-task learning framework that predicts both depression and PHQ-9 categories as aux- iliary tasks. We compare the quality of expla- nations generated based on the depression task only, versus those that use the predicted PHQ-9 categories. We find that by relying on clinically meaningful auxiliary tasks, we produce more meaningful explanations.

Explaining Models of Mental Health via Clinically Grounded Auxiliary Tasks

Conversational Agents (CAs) powered with deep language models (DLMs) have shown tremendous promise in the domain of mental health. Prominently, the CAs have been used to provide informational or therapeutic services to patients. However, the utility of CAs to assist in mental health triaging has not been explored in the existing work as it requires a controlled generation of follow-up questions (FQs), which are often initiated and guided by the mental health professionals (MHPs) in clinical settings. In the context of depression, our experiments show that DLMs coupled with process knowledge in a mental health questionnaire generate 12.54% and 9.37% better FQs based on similarity and longest common subsequence matches to questions in the PHQ-9 dataset respectively, when compared with DLMs without process knowledge support. Despite coupling with process knowledge, we find that DLMs are still prone to hallucination, i.e., generating redundant, irrelevant, and unsafe FQs. We demonstrate the challenge of using existing datasets to train a DLM for generating FQs that adhere to clinical process knowledge. To address this limitation, we prepared an extended PHQ-9 based dataset, PRIMATE, in collaboration with MHPs. PRIMATE contains annotations regarding whether a particular question in the PHQ-9 dataset has already been answered in the user's initial description of the mental health condition. We used PRIMATE to train a DLM in a supervised setting to identify which of the PHQ-9 questions can be answered directly from the user's post and which ones would require more information from the user. Using performance analysis based on MCC scores, we show that PRIMATE is appropriate for identifying questions in PHQ-9 that could guide generative DLMs towards controlled FQ generation suitable for aiding triaging. Dataset created as a part of this research: github.com/primate-mh/Primate2022

Learning to Automate Follow-up Question Generation using Process
Knowledge for Depression Triage on Reddit Posts

We study the phenomenon of linguistic synchrony between clients and therapists in a psychotherapy process. Linguistic Synchrony (LS) can be viewed as any observed interdependence or association between more than one person’s linguistic behavior. Accordingly, we establish LS as a methodological task. We suggest a LS function that applies a linguistic similarity measure based on the Jensen-Shannon distance across the observed part-of-speech tag distributions (JSDuPos) of the speakers in different
time frames. We perform a study over a unique corpus of 872 transcribed sessions, covering 68 clients and 59 therapists. After establishing the presence of client-therapist LS, we verify its association with therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome (measured using WAI and ORS), and additionally analyse the behavior of
JSDuPos throughout treatment. 

Results indicate that (1) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher therapeutic alliance as reported by the client and therapist at the end of the session, (2) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher level of treatment outcome as reported by the client at the beginnings of the next sessions, (3) there is a significant linear increase in linguistic similarity throughout
treatment, (4) surprisingly, higher LS associates with lower treatment outcome. Finally, we demonstrate how the LS function can be used to interpret and explore the mechanism for synchrony.

Measuring Linguistic Synchrony in Psychotherapy

This paper describes the participation of the groups NLP@UNED and IXA@EHU on the CLPsych 2022 shared task.
For task A, which tries to capture changes in mood over time, we have applied an Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) extraction technique with the aim of relabelling the user messages according to their proximity, based on the representation of these messages in a vector space. Regarding the subtask B, we have used the output of the subtask A to train a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict the risk of suicide at the user level.
The results obtained are very competitive considering that our team was one of the few that made use of the organisers' proposed virtual environment and also made use of the Task A output to predict the Task B results.

Approximate Nearest Neighbour Extraction Techniques and Neural Networks \\for Suicide Risk Prediction in the CLPsych 2022 Shared Task

This paper presents transformer-based models created for the CLPsych 2022 shared task. Using posts from Reddit users over a period of time, we aim to predict changes in mood from post to post. We test models that preserve timeline information through explicit ordering of posts as well as those that do not order posts but preserve features on the length of time between a user’s posts. We find that a model with temporal information may provide slight benefits over the same model without such information, although a RoBERTa transformer model provides
enough information to make similar predictions without custom-encoded time information.

Exploring transformers and time lag features for predicting changes in mood over time

This paper presents the system description of team BLUE for Task A of the CLPsych 2022 Shared Task on identifying changes in mood and behaviour in longitudinal textual data. These moments of change are signals that can be used to screen and prevent suicide attempts. To detect these changes, we experimented with several text representation methods, such as TF-IDF, sentence embeddings, emotion-informed embeddings and several classical machine learning classifiers. We chose to submit three runs of ensemble systems based on maximum voting on the predictions from the best performing models. Of the nine participating teams in Task A, our team ranked second in the Precision-oriented Coverage-based Evaluation, with a score of 0.499. Our best system was an ensemble of Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, and Adaptive Boosting classifiers using emotion-informed embeddings as input representation that can model both the linguistic and emotional information found in users’ posts.

Capturing Changes in Mood Over Time in Longitudinal Data Using Ensemble Methodologies

Psychological states unfold dynamically; to understand and measure mental health at scale we need to detect and measure these changes from sequences of online posts. We evaluate two approaches to capturing psychological changes in text: the first relies on computing the difference between the embedding of a message with the one that precedes it, the second relies on a "human-aware" multi-level recurrent transformer (HaRT). The mood changes of timeline posts of users were annotated into three classes, "ordinary", "switching" (positive to negative or vice versa) and "escalations" (increasing in intensity). For classifying these mood changes, the difference-between-embeddings technique -- applied to RoBERTa embeddings -- showed the highest overall F1 score (0.61) across the three different classes on the test set. The technique particularly outperformed the HaRT transformer (and other baselines) in the detection of switches (F1 = .33) and escalations (F1 = .61).
Consistent with the literature, the language use patterns associated with mental-health related constructs in prior work (including depression, stress, anger and anxiety) predicted both mood switches and escalations. 


WWBP-SQT-lite: Difference Embeddings and Multi-level Models for Moments of Change Identification in Mental Health Forums

Social media data have been used in research for many years to understand users’ mental health. In this paper, using user-generated content we aim to achieve two goals: the first is detecting moments of mood change over time using timelines of users from Reddit. The second is predicting the degree of suicide risk as a user-level classification task. We used different approaches to address longitudinal modelling as well as the problem of a severely imbalanced dataset. For the first task, using BERT with undersampling techniques performed the best among models tested, including LSTM and random forests models. For the second task, extracting features related to suicide from posts’ text contributed to the overall performance improvement. Specifically, a feature representing of a number of suicide-related words in a post improved accuracy by 17%. 


Predicting Moments of Mood Changes Overtime from Imbalanced Social Media Data 

This paper describes our systems for CLPsych’s 2022 Shared Task 1 . Subtask A involves capturing moments of change in an individual’s mood over time, while Subtask B asked us to identify the suicidality risk of a user. We explore multiple machine learning and deep learning methods for the same, taking real-life applicability into account while considering the design of the architecture. Our team, IIITH, achieved top results in different categories for both subtasks. Task A was evaluated on a post-level (using macro averaged F1) and on a window-based timeline level (using macro-averaged precision and recall). We scored a post-level F1 of 0.520 and ranked second with a timeline-level recall of 0.646. Task B was a user level task where we also came in second with a micro F1 of 0.520 and scored third place on the leaderboard with a macro F1 of 0.380.

Towards Capturing Changes in Mood and Identifying Suicidality Risk

We investigate the impact of using Multi-Task Learning (MTL) to predict mood changes over time for each individual (social media user) and also the impact it has on predicting an individual’s suicide risk severity. The presented models were developed as a part of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2022 shared task.

Are You Really Okay? A Transfer Learning-based Approach for Identification of Underlying Mental Illnesses

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Next from NAACL 2022

Explaining Models of Mental Health via Clinically Grounded Auxiliary Tasks

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The ethical role of computational linguistics in digital psychological formulation and suicide prevention

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