Cited by 155Mental Health via WritingExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Emotion and Mood Recognition

Towards Interpretable Mental Health Analysis with Large Language Models

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Yang, Kailai, Ji, Shaoxiong, Zhang, Tianlin, Xie, Qianqian, Kuang, Ziyan, Ananiadou, Sophia·2023·Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

The latest large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, exhibit strong capabilities in automated mental health analysis.However, existing relevant studies bear several limitations, including inadequate evaluations, lack of prompting strategies, and ignorance of exploring LLMs for explainability.To bridge these gaps, we comprehensively evaluate the mental health analysis and emotional reasoning ability of LLMs on 11 datasets across 5 tasks.We explore the effects of different prompting strategies with unsupervised and distantly supervised emotional information.Based on these prompts, we explore LLMs for interpretable mental health analysis by instructing them to generate explanations for each of their decisions.We convey strict human evaluations to assess the quality of the generated explanations, leading to a novel dataset with 163 humanassessed explanations 1 .We benchmark existing automatic evaluation metrics on this dataset to guide future related works.According to the results, ChatGPT shows strong in-context learning ability but still has a significant gap with advanced task-specific methods.Careful prompt engineering with emotional cues and expertwritten few-shot examples can also effectively improve performance on mental health analysis.In addition, ChatGPT generates explanations that approach human performance, showing its great potential in explainable mental health analysis.

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  • Prompting to concentrate on emotional clues in text improved ChatGPT performance on a variety of mental health-related tasks.

    “Prompting to concentrate on the emotional clues in text was also shown to improve ChatGPT performance on a variety of mental health-related tasks [71].”
  • ChatGPT has been shown to be able to explain why an individual was classified as experiencing stress or depressive symptoms.

    “ChatGPT has been shown to be able to explain why an individual was classified as experiencing stress or depressive symptoms [71]”

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Shaoxiong Ji, Tianlin Zhang, Luna Ansari, Jie Fu, Prayag Tiwari, and Erik Cambria. 2022b. Mental- bert: Publicly available pretrained language mod- els for mental healthcare. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Con- ference, pages 7184-7190. European Language Re- sources Association (ELRA).
  2. Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei- Jing Zhu. 2002. Bleu: a method for automatic evalu- ation of machine translation. In Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computa- tional Linguistics, pages 311-318.
  3. Nisan Stiennon, Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Daniel Ziegler, Ryan Lowe, Chelsea Voss, Alec Radford, Dario Amodei, and Paul F Christiano. 2020. Learn- ing to summarize with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33:3008- 3021.
  4. Ermal Toto, ML Tlachac, and Elke A Rundensteiner. 2021. Audibert: A deep transfer learning multimodal classification framework for depression screening. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM international con- ference on information & knowledge management, pages 4145-4154.
  5. Peng Zhou, Wei Shi, Jun Tian, Zhenyu Qi, Bingchen Li, Hongwei Hao, and Bo Xu. 2016. Attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory networks for relation classification. In Proceedings of the 54th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (volume 2: Short papers), pages 207-212.

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Authors
Yang, K., Ji, S., Zhang, T., Xie, Q., Kuang, Z., & Ananiadou, S.
Affiliations
  • University of Manchester (GB)
  • University of Helsinki (FI)
  • Yale University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2023
Pages
6056-6077
OpenAlex
W4389523980
Cited by
155
References
71
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 58 · 2024: 56 · 2023: 9
FWCI
77.54
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • Government of the United Kingdom
  • UK Research and Innovation
  • European Commission (HORIZON2020, 771113, 101070350)
  • China Scholarship Council
  • HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme
  • Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/P025684/1)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
Keywords
large language models, explainable AI, prompt engineering, emotional reasoning, explanation generation, ChatGPT, human evaluation of explanations, emotional cues, in-context learning

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