Explaining Models of Mental Health via Clinically Grounded Auxiliary Tasks

Ayah Zirikly, Mark Dredze

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Models of mental health based on natural language processing can uncover latent signals of mental health from language. Models that indicate 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 assessment framework to make these decisions; that framework can help a model generate meaningful explanations. In this work we propose to use PHQ-9 categories 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 auxiliary tasks. We compare the quality of explanations 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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCLPsych 2022 - 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, Proceedings
EditorsAyah Zirikly, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Maria Liakata, Steven Bedrick, Bart Desmet, Molly Ireland, Andrew Lee, Sean MacAvaney, Matthew Purver, Rebecca Resnik, Andrew Yates
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages30-39
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917872
StatePublished - 2022
Event8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, CLPsych 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Jul 15 2022 → …

Publication series

NameCLPsych 2022 - 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, Proceedings

Conference

Conference8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, CLPsych 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period7/15/22 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Speech and Hearing

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