Explainable Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Linhai Zhang, Ziyang Gao, Deyu Zhou, Yulan He


Abstract
Depression is a widespread mental health disorder, and clinical interviews are the gold standard for assessment. However, their reliance on scarce professionals highlights the need for automated detection. Current systems mainly employ black-box neural networks, which lack interpretability, which is crucial in mental health contexts. Some attempts to improve interpretability use post-hoc LLM generation but suffer from hallucination. To address these limitations, we propose RED, a Retrieval-augmented generation framework for Explainable depression Detection. RED retrieves evidence from clinical interview transcripts, providing explanations for predictions. Traditional query-based retrieval systems use a one-size-fits-all approach, which may not be optimal for depression detection, as user backgrounds and situations vary. We introduce a personalized query generation module that combines standard queries with user-specific background inferred by LLMs, tailoring retrieval to individual contexts. Additionally, to enhance LLM performance in social intelligence, we augment LLMs by retrieving relevant knowledge from a social intelligence datastore using an event-centric retriever. Experimental results on the real-world benchmark demonstrate RED’s effectiveness compared to neural networks and LLM-based baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.517
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9927–9944
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.517/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.517
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linhai Zhang, Ziyang Gao, Deyu Zhou, and Yulan He. 2025. Explainable Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 9927–9944, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.517.pdf