Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.

Very large language models (LLMs) perform extremely well on a spectrum of NLP tasks in a zero-shot setting. However, little is known about their performance on human-level NLP problems which rely on understanding psychological concepts, such as assessing personality traits. In this work, we investigate the zero-shot ability of GPT-3 to estimate the Big 5 personality traits from users’ social media posts. Through a set of systematic experiments, we find that zero-shot GPT-3 performance is somewhat close to an existing pre-trained SotA for broad classification upon injecting knowledge about the trait in the prompts. However, when prompted to provide fine-grained classification, its performance drops to close to a simple most frequent class (MFC) baseline. We further analyze where GPT-3 performs better, as well as worse, than a pretrained lexical model, illustrating systematic errors that suggest ways to improve LLMs on human-level NLP tasks. The code for this project is available on Github.

Psychological states unfold dynamically; to understand and measure mental health at scale we need to detect and measure these changes from sequences of online posts. We evaluate two approaches to capturing psychological changes in text: the first relies on computing the difference between the embedding of a message with the one that precedes it, the second relies on a “human-aware” multi-level recurrent transformer (HaRT). The mood changes of timeline posts of users were annotated into three classes, ‘ordinary,’ ‘switching’ (positive to negative or vice versa) and ‘escalations’ (increasing in intensity). For classifying these mood changes, the difference-between-embeddings technique – applied to RoBERTa embeddings – showed the highest overall F1 score (0.61) across the three different classes on the test set. The technique particularly outperformed the HaRT transformer (and other baselines) in the detection of switches (F1 = .33) and escalations (F1 = .61).Consistent with the literature, the language use patterns associated with mental-health related constructs in prior work (including depression, stress, anger and anxiety) predicted both mood switches and escalations.

In human-level NLP tasks, such as predicting mental health, personality, or demographics, the number of observations is often smaller than the standard 768+ hidden state sizes of each layer within modern transformer-based language models, limiting the ability to effectively leverage transformers. Here, we provide a systematic study on the role of dimension reduction methods (principal components analysis, factorization techniques, or multi-layer auto-encoders) as well as the dimensionality of embedding vectors and sample sizes as a function of predictive performance. We first find that fine-tuning large models with a limited amount of data pose a significant difficulty which can be overcome with a pre-trained dimension reduction regime. RoBERTa consistently achieves top performance in human-level tasks, with PCA giving benefit over other reduction methods in better handling users that write longer texts. Finally, we observe that a majority of the tasks achieve results comparable to the best performance with just 1/12 of the embedding dimensions.