Margareta A. Kulcsar
2025
Extracting Behaviors from German Clinical Interviews in Support of Autism Spectrum Diagnosis
Margareta A. Kulcsar
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Ian Paul Grant
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Massimo Poesio
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics
Accurate identification of behaviors is essential for diagnosing developmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We frame the extraction of behaviors from text as a specialized form of event extraction grounded in the TimeML framework and evaluate two approaches: a pipeline model and an end-to-end model that directly extracts behavior spans from raw text. We introduce two novel datasets: a new clinical annotation of an existing Reddit corpus of parent-authored posts in English and a clinically annotated corpus of German ASD diagnostic interviews. On the English dataset, the end-to-end BERT model achieved an F1 score of 73.4% in behavior classification, outperforming the pipeline models (F1: 66.8% and 53.65%). On the German clinical dataset, the end-to-end model reached an even higher F1 score of 80.1%, again outperforming the pipeline (F1: 78.7%) and approaching the gold-annotated upper bound (F1: 92.9%). These results demonstrate that behavior classification benefits from direct extraction, and that our method generalizes across domains and languages.