4arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·
Spanish mental health NLP: domain-adapted models and Incremental Context Expansion for early risk detection
Researchers introduce three Spanish-language foundational models pre-trained on mental health domain data, alongside a novel automatic relabeling methodology called Incremental Context Expansion (ICE) for early disorder detection in social media posts. ICE identifies the minimal cumulative message window sufficient to evidence a disorder, generating more informative training samples and reducing detection latency. Evaluation on three Spanish benchmarks shows state-of-the-art improvements, and all models are publicly released.
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Automated ICD Classification of Psychiatric Diagnoses Using NLP and LLMs
This study evaluates NLP and ML approaches for automating the mapping of free-text psychiatric descriptions to ICD diagnostic codes, using a dataset of 145,513 Spanish clinical records. Methods range from classical BoW/TF-IDF representations to transformer-based embeddings including e5_large, BioLORD, and Llama-3-8B. Fine-tuned e5_large achieved the best performance with a micro-F1 of 0.866, outperforming classical methods by capturing semantic nuance and medical terminology. The work highlights challenges of long-tail label distributions and ambiguity specific to psychiatric clinical language.
EMPATH: Multilingual multi-turn safety benchmark for emotional-support chatbots reveals score inflation and run-to-run reliability failures
EMPATH is a new arXiv benchmark for evaluating the safety of emotional-support chatbots, using an auditor model to generate multi-turn crisis conversations and a calibrated judge model to score transcripts across 19 metrics in five dimensions. Built for Mexican Spanish and US English, the benchmark surfaces score inflation on 10 of 19 metrics under uncalibrated rubrics and finds that run-to-run reliability is a per-model safety property: one model swings 2–10 points on a crisis metric across identical reruns, and DeepSeek V4 Pro produces different conversations at temperature 0. Evaluation of three frontier models shows aggregate scores within 0.74 points but per-metric divergences up to six points, with rankings stable across a cross-family judge at 93% within ±1.
Risk-Aware Hybrid Selective Classification for HIV Suspicion Identification in Spanish Clinical Notes
This paper proposes a hybrid selective classification framework for clinical NLP that explicitly handles both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to avoid overconfident predictions in medical triage settings. The system combines Mondrian conformal prediction with a Multi-Centroid Mahalanobis Distance veto, evaluated on HIV suspicion identification in Spanish clinical notes. The authors demonstrate that standard uncertainty metrics and baseline classifiers suffer coverage collapse under strict reliability constraints, while their dual-verification approach isolates a trustworthy operational domain. The work critiques inflated benchmark metrics that arise from forcing deterministic classification on inherently ambiguous clinical instances.
Fine-tuning LLMs to passively estimate depression severity from AI mental health conversations
Researchers fine-tune a Qwen3.5-27B model with a regression head to predict PHQ-9 depression severity scores directly from AI mental health app conversation transcripts, eliminating the need for explicit self-report completion. The training set of 6,283 users combines 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudolabels generated by Claude Opus and iterative intermediate models. On a held-out test of 842 users, the best model achieves MAE=2.6, Pearson r=0.80, and AUC=0.91 at the clinical PHQ-9≥10 threshold, with AUC>0.87 across all severity thresholds. The work demonstrates a passive, continuous symptom-monitoring approach that could reduce response bias in mental health platforms.
Self-evolving LLM annotation framework for DSM-5-TR-aligned depression symptom labeling
A new arXiv preprint proposes a human-in-the-loop annotation framework for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) that combines LLM-assisted labeling with expert verification across three stages: evidence selection, DSM-5-TR criterion analysis, and case-level synthesis. A dual-memory architecture (Example Memory and Reflection Memory) internalizes expert feedback to iteratively improve annotations without model retraining. The framework targets dataset construction for explainable AI in mental health rather than clinical diagnosis, and exports reasoning traces and edit histories for auditability. A pilot study reports improved annotation consistency and reduced manual revision effort.
Forgotten Words: Benchmarking NeoBERT for Dementia Detection in Low-Resource Conversational Filipino and English Speech
This paper presents the first NLP-based dementia detection study for Filipino speech, constructing a parallel bilingual dataset of 4,000 DementiaBank-derived transcripts with manual Filipino translations. Five model families are evaluated across monolingual, zero-shot cross-lingual, and bilingual fine-tuning settings. English-trained BERT degrades sharply on Filipino (Macro-F1 = 0.455), but bilingual fine-tuning recovers performance to Macro-F1 = 0.969–0.973 across all transformer models. The key finding is that multilingual clinical NLP performance is driven by linguistic coverage during training rather than model scale or architecture.
LLUMI: Fine-Tuning Open-Source LLMs for Mental Health Writing Assistance Using Reddit Community Feedback
LLUMI is a two-component system (a generation model and an improvement model) designed to provide mental health writing assistance using smaller open-source LLMs hosted in privacy-preserving, on-premise environments. The system leverages Reddit community endorsement signals (upvotes/downvotes) to construct preference pairs for SFT and DPO training, then further aligns outputs via human evaluation across readability, empathy, connection, actionability, and safety dimensions. Results show LLUMI achieves performance comparable to proprietary GPT-based models on linguistic and human evaluations, suggesting community-derived preference signals can substitute for expensive expert labeling in sensitive domains.
Multi-stage explainability framework translates transformer speech models into clinical cognitive impairment narratives
A new arXiv preprint proposes a framework for making transformer-based speech cognitive impairment detection clinically interpretable by combining SHAP token attribution, linguistic feature analysis, and a four-stage LLM reasoning pipeline using LLaMA-3.1-70B-Instruct. The system is built on the SpeechCARE-Adaptive Gating Network multimodal model (F1=72.11% on NIA PREPARE) and maps outputs to four cognitive-linguistic dimensions. Physician evaluation on 70 samples showed strong alignment with clinical profiles and a System Usability Scale score of 82/100, suggesting practical clinical workflow integration potential.