A Computational Framework to Identify Self-Aspects in Text

Jaya Caporusso, Matthew Purver, Senja Pollak


Abstract
This Ph.D. proposal introduces a plan to develop a computational framework to identify Self-aspects in text. The Self is a multifaceted construct and it is reflected in language. While it is described across disciplines like cognitive science and phenomenology, it remains underexplored in natural language processing (NLP). Many of the aspects of the Self align with psychological and other well-researched phenomena (e.g., those related to mental health), highlighting the need for systematic NLP-based analysis. In line with this, we plan to introduce an ontology of Self-aspects and a gold-standard annotated dataset. Using this foundation, we will develop and evaluate conventional discriminative models, generative large language models, and embedding-based retrieval approaches against four main criteria: interpretability, ground-truth adherence, accuracy, and computational efficiency. Top-performing models will be applied in case studies in mental health and empirical phenomenology.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-srw.47
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
Venues:
ACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
725–739
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.acl-srw.47/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaya Caporusso, Matthew Purver, and Senja Pollak. 2025. A Computational Framework to Identify Self-Aspects in Text. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 725–739, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Computational Framework to Identify Self-Aspects in Text (Caporusso et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.acl-srw.47.pdf