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
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.61/
- DOI:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.61.pdf