With the rise of mental health challenges, social media has become a key platform for emotional expression. Deep learning offers a promising solution for analyzing mental health but lacks flexibility and interpretability. Large language models (LLMs) introduce greater adaptability and can explain their decisions, yet they still underperform deep learning in complex psychological analysis. We present C-IMHI, the first multi-task Chinese social media interpretable mental health instruction dataset (9K samples) with quality control and manual validation. Additionally, we introduce MentalGLM, the first open-source Chinese LLMs for explainable mental health analysis, trained on 50K instructions. The proposed models excelled in three mental health downstream tasks, outperforming or matching deep learning and LLMs. A portion of the generated decision explanations was validated by experts, demonstrating promising accuracy and reliability. We evaluated the proposed models on a clinical dataset, where they significantly outperformed other LLMs, demonstrating their potential for clinical applications. Our models show strong performance, validated across tasks and domains. The decision explanations enhance usability and facilitate better understanding and practical application of the models. Both the constructed dataset and the models are publicly available via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/MentalGLM.

Cognitive distortion is a critical issue in psychology, with most existing studies based on Burns’ cognitive distortion theory. However, differences in annotation standards lead to variations in building analysis tools, resulting in inconsistent analyses and limiting the generalizability of findings, especially in large-scale and cross-linguistic contexts. To address this issue, we collected all publicly available datasets (four in total) and conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the generalizability of various cross-linguistic models. The results indicate that models exhibit significant performance differences across datasets, highlighting the generalization problem. To mitigate this issue, we propose two solutions. First, we propose a multi-task learning model based on teacher student architecture solution, which demonstrates improved generalization performance in our experiments. Second, we introduce a new dataset (~5,000 samples) derived from reannotating existing open datasets to ensure standardized alignment. The annotation process we provided is interpretable and grounded in psychological principles. Based on this, we constructed large language models with cognitive reasoning chains, enhancing both generalizability and interpretability. This study identifies the generalization challenge in cognitive distortion research, and our experiments show that the proposed solutions significantly improve model performance. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/HongzhiQ/CrossLinCD.

The UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) includes the exceptionally valuable cultural and natural heritage to be preserved for mankind. Evaluating and justifying the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) is essential for each site inscribed in the WHL, and yet a complex task, even for experts, since the selection criteria of OUV are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, manual annotation of heritage values and attributes from multi-source textual data, which is currently dominant in heritage studies, is knowledge-demanding and time-consuming, impeding systematic analysis of such authoritative documents in terms of their implications on heritage management. This study applies state-of-the-art NLP models to build a classifier on a new dataset containing Statements of OUV, seeking an explainable and scalable automation tool to facilitate the nomination, evaluation, research, and monitoring processes of World Heritage sites. Label smoothing is innovatively adapted to improve the model performance by adding prior inter-class relationship knowledge to generate soft labels. The study shows that the best models fine-tuned from BERT and ULMFiT can reach 94.3% top-3 accuracy. A human study with expert evaluation on the model prediction shows that the models are sufficiently generalizable. The study is promising to be further developed and applied in heritage research and practice.