Combining Psychological Theory with Language Models for Suicide Risk Detection

Daniel Izmaylov, Amir Bialer, Avi Segal, Meytal Grimland, Yossi Levi-Belz, Kobi Gal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent years saw a dramatic increase in the popularity of online counseling services providing emergency mental health support. This paper provides a new language model for automatic detection of suicide risk in online chat sessions between help-seekers and counselors. The model adapts a hierarchical BERT language model for this task. It extends the state of the art in capturing aspects of the conversation structure in the counseling session and in integrating psychological theory into the model. We test the performance of our approach in a leading national online counseling service that operates in the Hebrew language. Our model outperformed other non-hierarchical approaches from the literature, achieving a 0.76 F2 score and 0.92 ROC-AUC. Moreover, we demonstrate our model’s superiority over strong baselines even early on in the conversation, which is key for real-time detection in the field. This is a first step towards incorporating suicide predictive models in online support services and advancing NLP tools for resource-bounded languages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2023 - 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of EACL 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages2385-2393
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429470
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2023
Event17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023 - Findings of EACL 2023 - Dubrovnik, Croatia
Duration: 2 May 20236 May 2023

Publication series

NameEACL 2023 - 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of EACL 2023

Conference

Conference17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023 - Findings of EACL 2023
Country/TerritoryCroatia
CityDubrovnik
Period2/05/236/05/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Software
  • Linguistics and Language

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