Beyond Accuracy: Interpreting Topic Representation in Suicide Ideation Detection Models

Hamideh Ghanadian, Isar Nejadgholi, Hussein Al Osman


Abstract
Suicide ideation detection models are typically evaluated using aggregate performance metrics, yet little is known about how they internally represent psychologically meaningful risk factors. In high-stakes mental health applications, understanding these internal representations is essential for safety, transparency, and responsible deployment. In this work, we move beyond accuracy and analyze how suicide detection models trained on original and topic-augmented datasets encode psychological risk factors in their internal representation space. Using visualization and geometric analysis, we examine the coherence and separability of topic-related features. Our results show that topic-aware augmentation increases the clarity and distinctness of underrepresented psychosocial risk factors such as immigration, family issues, and financial crisis. These findings suggest that augmentation not only improves model performance but also leads to more structured and interpretable internal representations.
Anthology ID:
2026.starsem-conference.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Saif M. Mohammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum
Venues:
*SEM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
290–301
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.starsem-conference.19/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hamideh Ghanadian, Isar Nejadgholi, and Hussein Al Osman. 2026. Beyond Accuracy: Interpreting Topic Representation in Suicide Ideation Detection Models. In Proceedings of the 15th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2026), pages 290–301, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Accuracy: Interpreting Topic Representation in Suicide Ideation Detection Models (Ghanadian et al., *SEM 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.starsem-conference.19.pdf