The increasing demand for mental health services has highlighted the need for innovative solutions, particularly in the realm of psychological conversational AI, where the availability of sensitive data is scarce. In this work, we explored the development of a system tailored for mental health support with a novel approach to psychological assessment based on explainable emotional profiles in combination with empathetic conversational models, offering a promising tool for augmenting traditional care, particularly where immediate expertise is unavailable. Our work can be divided into two main parts, intrinsecaly connected to each other. First, we present RACLETTE, a conversational system that demonstrates superior emotional accuracy compared to considered benchmarks in both understanding users’ emotional states and generating empathetic responses during conversations, while progressively building an emotional profile of the user through their interactions. Second, we show how the emotional profiles of a user can be used as interpretable markers for mental health assessment. These profiles can be compared with characteristic emotional patterns associated with different mental disorders, providing a novel approach to preliminary screening and support.

This paper describes the participation of the USI-UPF team at the shared task of the 2019 Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology Workshop (CLPsych2019). The goal is to assess the degree of suicide risk of social media users given a labelled dataset with their posts. An appropriate suicide risk assessment, with the usage of automated methods, can assist experts on the detection of people at risk and eventually contribute to prevent suicide. We propose a set of machine learning models with features based on lexicons, word embeddings, word level n-grams, and statistics extracted from users’ posts. The results show that the most effective models for the tasks are obtained integrating lexicon-based features, a selected set of n-grams, and statistical measures.

This paper describes the participation of USI-IR in WASSA 2018 Implicit Emotion Shared Task. We propose a relevance feedback approach employing a sequential model (biLSTM) and word embeddings derived from a large collection of tweets. To this end, we assume that the top-k predictions produce at a first classification step are correct (based on the model accuracy) and use them as new examples to re-train the network.