@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-rethinking-depression,
    title = "Rethinking Depression Prediction from a Fine-Grained Subscore Modeling Perspective via Multi-Task Learning",
    author = "Wang, Zhenguang  and
      Li, Bo  and
      Tan, Wenhui  and
      Cao, Peng  and
      Wang, Yang  and
      Duan, Jia  and
      Wang, Fei  and
      Zaiane, Osmar",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1841/",
    pages = "39659--39672",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Standard depression assessment relies on instruments such as the clinician-rated Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) and the patient-reported Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8), but manual scoring is time-consuming and subject to inter-rater variability. Prior automated approaches typically regress a single total score or coarse severity category, lacking the fine-grained subscore-level supervision needed for precise clinical diagnosis. To address this, we propose MTSP (Multi-Task Subscore Prediction), a fine-grained model for subscore prediction via multi-task learning. MTSP achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public E-DAIC dataset (MAE 3.48, RMSE 4.57) and generalizes well to the public PDCH and a large-scale private clinical dataset (CIDH), outperforming total-score regression baselines and Qwen3-14B direct scoring. We further show that multi-task learning is essential, subscore-level supervision improves assessment by better capturing symptom-cluster structure, and prior constraints plus task-level self-paced learning enhance robustness to subscore difficulty and annotation noise."
}