This paper explores the impact of incorporating sentiment, emotion, and domain-specific lexicons into a transformer-based model for depression symptom estimation. Lexicon information is added by marking the words in the input transcripts of patient-therapist conversations as well as in social media posts. Overall results show that the introduction of external knowledge within pre-trained language models can be beneficial for prediction performance, while different lexicons show distinct behaviours depending on the targeted task. Additionally, new state-of-the-art results are obtained for the estimation of depression level over patient-therapist interviews.

The ever-growing number of people suffering from mental distress has motivated significant research initiatives towards automated depression estimation. Despite the multidisciplinary nature of the task, very few of these approaches include medical professionals in their research process, thus ignoring a vital source of domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose to bring the domain experts back into the loop and incorporate their knowledge within the gold-standard DAIC-WOZ dataset. In particular, we define a novel transformer-based architecture and analyse its performance in light of our expert annotations. Overall findings demonstrate a strong correlation between the psychological tendencies of medical professionals and the behavior of the proposed model, which additionally provides new state-of-the-art results.

This paper addresses the quality of annotations in mental health datasets used for NLP-based depression level estimation from social media texts. While previous research relies on social media-based datasets annotated with binary categories, i.e. depressed or non-depressed, recent datasets such as D2S and PRIMATE aim for nuanced annotations using PHQ-9 symptoms. However, most of these datasets rely on crowd workers without the domain knowledge for annotation. Focusing on the PRIMATE dataset, our study reveals concerns regarding annotation validity, particularly for the lack of interest or pleasure symptom. Through reannotation by a mental health professional, we introduce finer labels and textual spans as evidence, identifying a notable number of false positives. Our refined annotations, to be released under a Data Use Agreement, offer a higher-quality test set for anhedonia detection. This study underscores the necessity of addressing annotation quality issues in mental health datasets, advocating for improved methodologies to enhance NLP model reliability in mental health assessments.

This paper presents our system for the MEDIQA-Chat 2023 shared task on medical conversation summarization. Our approach involves finetuning a LongT5 model on multiple tasks simultaneously, which we demonstrate improves the model’s overall performance while reducing the number of factual errors and hallucinations in the generated summary. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of augmenting the data with in-text annotations from a clinical named entity recognition model, finding that this approach decreased summarization quality. Lastly, we explore using different text generation strategies for medical note generation based on the length of the note. Our findings suggest that the application of our proposed approach can be beneficial for improving the accuracy and effectiveness of medical conversation summarization.

We propose a novel hybrid approach to lemmatization that enhances the seq2seq neural model with additional lemmas extracted from an external lexicon or a rule-based system. During training, the enhanced lemmatizer learns both to generate lemmas via a sequential decoder and copy the lemma characters from the external candidates supplied during run-time. Our lemmatizer enhanced with candidates extracted from the Apertium morphological analyzer achieves statistically significant improvements compared to baseline models not utilizing additional lemma information, achieves an average accuracy of 97.25% on a set of 23 UD languages, which is 0.55% higher than obtained with the Stanford Stanza model on the same set of languages. We also compare with other methods of integrating external data into lemmatization and show that our enhanced system performs considerably better than a simple lexicon extension method based on the Stanza system, and it achieves complementary improvements w.r.t. the data augmentation method.

We explore how well a sequence labeling approach, namely, recurrent neural network, is suited for the task of resource-poor and POS tagging free word stress detection in the Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian languages. We present new datasets, annotated with the word stress, for the three languages and compare several RNN models trained on three languages and explore possible applications of the transfer learning for the task. We show that it is possible to train a model in a cross-lingual setting and that using additional languages improves the quality of the results.

In this study we address the problem of automated word stress detection in Russian using character level models and no part-speech-taggers. We use a simple bidirectional RNN with LSTM nodes and achieve accuracy of 90% or higher. We experiment with two training datasets and show that using the data from an annotated corpus is much more efficient than using only a dictionary, since it allows to retain the context of the word and its morphological features.