Signs of Struggle: Spotting Cognitive Distortions across Language and Register

Abhishek Kuber, Enrico Liscio, Ruixuan Zhang, Caroline Figueroa, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah


Abstract
Rising mental health issues among youth have increased interest in automated approaches for detecting early signs of psychological distress in digital text. One key focus is the identification of cognitive distortions, irrational thought patterns that have a role in aggravating mental distress. Early detection of these distortions may enable timely, low-cost interventions. While prior work has focused on English clinical data, we present the first in-depth study of cross-lingual and cross-register generalization of cognitive distortion detection, analyzing forum posts written by Dutch adolescents. Our findings show that while changes in language and writing style can significantly affect model performance, domain adaptation methods show the most promise
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.61
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1041–1054
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.61/
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Cite (ACL):
Abhishek Kuber, Enrico Liscio, Ruixuan Zhang, Caroline Figueroa, and Pradeep K. Murukannaiah. 2025. Signs of Struggle: Spotting Cognitive Distortions across Language and Register. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1041–1054, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Signs of Struggle: Spotting Cognitive Distortions across Language and Register (Kuber et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.61.pdf