Muskan Garg

Muskan Garg, Chandni Saxena, Veena Krishnan et al.

Research community has witnessed substantial growth in the detection of mental health issues and their associated reasons from analysis of social media. We introduce a new dataset for Causal Analysis of Mental health issues in Social media posts (CAMS). Our contributions for causal analysis are two-fold: causal interpretation and causal categorization. We introduce an annotation schema for this task of causal analysis. We demonstrate the efficacy of our schema on two different datasets: (i) crawling and annotating 3155 Reddit posts and (ii) re-annotating the publicly available SDCNL dataset of 1896 instances for interpretable causal analysis. We further combine these into the CAMS dataset and make this resource publicly available along with associated source code: https://github.com/drmuskangarg/CAMS. We present experimental results of models learned from CAMS dataset and demonstrate that a classic Logistic Regression model outperforms the next best (CNN-LSTM) model by 4.9\% accuracy.

Chandreen Liyanage, Muskan Garg, Vijay Mago et al.

Amid ongoing health crisis, there is a growing necessity to discern possible signs of Wellness Dimensions (WD) manifested in self-narrated text. As the distribution of WD on social media data is intrinsically imbalanced, we experiment the generative NLP models for data augmentation to enable further improvement in the pre-screening task of classifying WD. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation approach through prompt-based Generative NLP models, and evaluate the ROUGE scores and syntactic/semantic similarity among existing interpretations and augmented data. Our approach with ChatGPT model surpasses all the other methods and achieves improvement over baselines such as Easy-Data Augmentation and Backtranslation. Introducing data augmentation to generate more training samples and balanced dataset, results in the improved F-score and the Matthew's Correlation Coefficient for upto 13.11% and 15.95%, respectively.

Sindhuja Chaduvula, Jessee Ho, Kina Kim et al.

Over the last decade, explainable AI has primarily focused on interpreting individual model predictions, producing post-hoc explanations that relate inputs to outputs under a fixed decision structure. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic AI systems whose behaviour unfolds over multi-step trajectories. In these settings, success and failure are determined by sequences of decisions rather than a single output. While useful, it remains unclear how explanation approaches designed for static predictions translate to agentic settings where behaviour emerges over time. In this work, we bridge the gap between static and agentic explainability by comparing attribution-based explanations with trace-based diagnostics across both settings. To make this distinction explicit, we empirically compare attribution-based explanations used in static classification tasks with trace-based diagnostics used in agentic benchmarks (TAU-bench Airline and AssistantBench). Our results show that while attribution methods achieve stable feature rankings in static settings (Spearman $ρ= 0.86$), they cannot be applied reliably to diagnose execution-level failures in agentic trajectories. In contrast, trace-grounded rubric evaluation for agentic settings consistently localizes behaviour breakdowns and reveals that state tracking inconsistency is 2.7$\times$ more prevalent in failed runs and reduces success probability by 49\%. These findings motivate a shift towards trajectory-level explainability for agentic systems when evaluating and diagnosing autonomous AI behaviour. Resources: https://github.com/VectorInstitute/unified-xai-evaluation-framework https://vectorinstitute.github.io/unified-xai-evaluation-framework

Muskan Garg, Chandni Saxena, Usman Naseem et al.

Interactions among humans on social media often convey intentions behind their actions, yielding a psychological language resource for Mental Health Analysis (MHA) of online users. The success of Computational Intelligence Techniques (CIT) for inferring mental illness from such social media resources points to NLP as a lens for causal analysis and perception mining. However, we argue that more consequential and explainable research is required for optimal impact on clinical psychology practice and personalized mental healthcare. To bridge this gap, we posit two significant dimensions: (1) Causal analysis to illustrate a cause and effect relationship in the user generated text; (2) Perception mining to infer psychological perspectives of social effects on online users intentions. Within the scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we further explore critical areas of inquiry associated with these two dimensions, specifically through recent advancements in discourse analysis. This position paper guides the community to explore solutions in this space and advance the state of practice in developing conversational agents for inferring mental health from social media. We advocate for a more explainable approach toward modeling computational psychology problems through the lens of language as we observe an increased number of research contributions in dataset and problem formulation for causal relation extraction and perception enhancements while inferring mental states.

Chandni Saxena, Muskan Garg, Gunjan Ansari

With recent developments in Social Computing, Natural Language Processing and Clinical Psychology, the social NLP research community addresses the challenge of automation in mental illness on social media. A recent extension to the problem of multi-class classification of mental health issues is to identify the cause behind the user's intention. However, multi-class causal categorization for mental health issues on social media has a major challenge of wrong prediction due to the overlapping problem of causal explanations. There are two possible mitigation techniques to solve this problem: (i) Inconsistency among causal explanations/ inappropriate human-annotated inferences in the dataset, (ii) in-depth analysis of arguments and stances in self-reported text using discourse analysis. In this research work, we hypothesise that if there exists the inconsistency among F1 scores of different classes, there must be inconsistency among corresponding causal explanations as well. In this task, we fine tune the classifiers and find explanations for multi-class causal categorization of mental illness on social media with LIME and Integrated Gradient (IG) methods. We test our methods with CAMS dataset and validate with annotated interpretations. A key contribution of this research work is to find the reason behind inconsistency in accuracy of multi-class causal categorization. The effectiveness of our methods is evident with the results obtained having category-wise average scores of $81.29 \%$ and $0.906$ using cosine similarity and word mover's distance, respectively.

Shaina Raza, Muskan Garg, Deepak John Reji et al.

Bias in textual data can lead to skewed interpretations and outcomes when the data is used. These biases could perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. An algorithm trained on biased data may end up making decisions that disproportionately impact a certain group of people. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and remove these biases to ensure the fair and ethical use of data. To this end, we develop a comprehensive and robust framework NBIAS that consists of four main layers: data, corpus construction, model development and an evaluation layer. The dataset is constructed by collecting diverse data from various domains, including social media, healthcare, and job hiring portals. As such, we applied a transformer-based token classification model that is able to identify bias words/ phrases through a unique named entity BIAS. In the evaluation procedure, we incorporate a blend of quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge the effectiveness of our models. We achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 1% to 8% compared to baselines. We are also able to generate a robust understanding of the model functioning. The proposed approach is applicable to a variety of biases and contributes to the fair and ethical use of textual data.

Muskan Garg, Manas Gaur, Raxit Goswami et al.

Low self-esteem and interpersonal needs (i.e., thwarted belongingness (TB) and perceived burdensomeness (PB)) have a major impact on depression and suicide attempts. Individuals seek social connectedness on social media to boost and alleviate their loneliness. Social media platforms allow people to express their thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and emotions. Prior studies on mental health from social media have focused on symptoms, causes, and disorders. Whereas an initial screening of social media content for interpersonal risk factors and low self-esteem may raise early alerts and assign therapists to at-risk users of mental disturbance. Standardized scales measure self-esteem and interpersonal needs from questions created using psychological theories. In the current research, we introduce a psychology-grounded and expertly annotated dataset, LoST: Low Self esTeem, to study and detect low self-esteem on Reddit. Through an annotation approach involving checks on coherence, correctness, consistency, and reliability, we ensure gold-standard for supervised learning. We present results from different deep language models tested using two data augmentation techniques. Our findings suggest developing a class of language models that infuses psychological and clinical knowledge.

Muskan Garg

During the current mental health crisis, the importance of identifying potential indicators of mental issues from social media content has surged. Overlooking the multifaceted nature of mental and social well-being can have detrimental effects on one's mental state. In traditional therapy sessions, professionals manually pinpoint the origins and outcomes of underlying mental challenges, a process both detailed and time-intensive. We introduce an approach to this intricate mental health analysis by framing the identification of wellness dimensions in Reddit content as a wellness concept extraction and categorization challenge. We've curated a unique dataset named WELLXPLAIN, comprising 3,092 entries and totaling 72,813 words. Drawing from Halbert L. Dunn's well-regarded wellness theory, our team formulated an annotation framework along with guidelines. This dataset also includes human-marked textual segments, offering clear reasoning for decisions made in the wellness concept categorization process. Our aim in publishing this dataset and analyzing initial benchmarks is to spearhead the creation of advanced language models tailored for healthcare-focused concept extraction and categorization.

Surjodeep Sarkar, Manas Gaur, L. Chen et al.

Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) are seeing continual advancements to support the overburdened global healthcare system that gets 60 million primary care visits, and 6 million Emergency Room (ER) visits annually. These systems are built by clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). At present, the role of VMHAs is to provide emotional support through information, focusing less on developing a reflective conversation with the patient. A more comprehensive, safe and explainable approach is required to build responsible VMHAs to ask follow-up questions or provide a well-informed response. This survey offers a systematic critical review of the existing conversational agents in mental health, followed by new insights into the improvements of VMHAs with contextual knowledge, datasets, and their emerging role in clinical decision support. We also provide new directions toward enriching the user experience of VMHAs with explainability, safety, and wholesome trustworthiness. Finally, we provide evaluation metrics and practical considerations for VMHAs beyond the current literature to build trust between VMHAs and patients in active communications.

Muskan Garg

Motivated with recent advances in inferring users' mental state in social media posts, we identify and formulate the problem of finding causal indicators behind mental illness in self-reported text. In the past, we witness the presence of rule-based studies for causal explanation analysis on curated Facebook data. The investigation on transformer-based model for multi-class causal categorization in Reddit posts point to a problem of using long-text which contains as many as 4000 words. Developing end-to-end transformer-based models subject to the limitation of maximum-length in a given instance. To handle this problem, we use Longformer and deploy its encoding on transformer-based classifier. The experimental results show that Longformer achieves new state-of-the-art results on M-CAMS, a publicly available dataset with 62\% F1-score. Cause-specific analysis and ablation study prove the effectiveness of Longformer. We believe our work facilitates causal analysis of depression and suicide risk on social media data, and shows potential for application on other mental health conditions.

Simranjeet Kaur, Ritika Bhardwaj, Aastha Jain et al.

With recent developments in digitization of clinical psychology, NLP research community has revolutionized the field of mental health detection on social media. Existing research in mental health analysis revolves around the cross-sectional studies to classify users' intent on social media. For in-depth analysis, we investigate existing classifiers to solve the problem of causal categorization which suggests the inefficiency of learning based methods due to limited training samples. To handle this challenge, we use transformer models and demonstrate the efficacy of a pre-trained transfer learning on "CAMS" dataset. The experimental result improves the accuracy and depicts the importance of identifying cause-and-effect relationships in the underlying text.

Muskan Garg, Naveen Aggarwal

This research work is about recent development made in speech recognition. In this research work, analysis of isolated digit recognition in the presence of different bit rates and at different noise levels has been performed. This research work has been carried using audacity and HTK toolkit. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is the recognition model which was used to perform this experiment. The feature extraction techniques used are Mel Frequency Cepstrum coefficient (MFCC), Linear Predictive Coding (LPC), perceptual linear predictive (PLP), mel spectrum (MELSPEC), filter bank (FBANK). There were three types of different noise levels which have been considered for testing of data. These include random noise, fan noise and random noise in real time environment. This was done to analyse the best environment which can used for real time applications. Further, five different types of commonly used bit rates at different sampling rates were considered to find out the most optimum bit rate.

MSVPJ Sathvik, Surjodeep Sarkar, Chandni Saxena et al.

Mental health professionals and clinicians have observed the upsurge of mental disorders due to Interpersonal Risk Factors (IRFs). To simulate the human-in-the-loop triaging scenario for early detection of mental health disorders, we recognized textual indications to ascertain these IRFs : Thwarted Belongingness (TBe) and Perceived Burdensomeness (PBu) within personal narratives. In light of this, we use N-shot learning with GPT-3 model on the IRF dataset, and underscored the importance of fine-tuning GPT-3 model to incorporate the context-specific sensitivity and the interconnectedness of textual cues that represent both IRFs. In this paper, we introduce an Interpretable Prompting (InterPrompt)} method to boost the attention mechanism by fine-tuning the GPT-3 model. This allows a more sophisticated level of language modification by adjusting the pre-trained weights. Our model learns to detect usual patterns and underlying connections across both the IRFs, which leads to better system-level explainability and trustworthiness. The results of our research demonstrate that all four variants of GPT-3 model, when fine-tuned with InterPrompt, perform considerably better as compared to the baseline methods, both in terms of classification and explanation generation.

Muskan Garg, Shaina Raza, Shebuti Rayana et al.

Despite substantial progress in healthcare applications driven by large language models (LLMs), growing concerns around data privacy, and limited resources; the small language models (SLMs) offer a scalable and clinically viable solution for efficient performance in resource-constrained environments for next-generation healthcare informatics. Our comprehensive survey presents a taxonomic framework to identify and categorize them for healthcare professionals and informaticians. The timeline of healthcare SLM contributions establishes a foundational framework for analyzing models across three dimensions: NLP tasks, stakeholder roles, and the continuum of care. We present a taxonomic framework to identify the architectural foundations for building models from scratch; adapting SLMs to clinical precision through prompting, instruction fine-tuning, and reasoning; and accessibility and sustainability through compression techniques. Our primary objective is to offer a comprehensive survey for healthcare professionals, introducing recent innovations in model optimization and equipping them with curated resources to support future research and development in the field. Aiming to showcase the groundbreaking advancements in SLMs for healthcare, we present a comprehensive compilation of experimental results across widely studied NLP tasks in healthcare to highlight the transformative potential of SLMs in healthcare. The updated repository is available at Github

Muskan Garg, MSVPJ Sathvik, Amrit Chadha et al.

The social NLP research community witness a recent surge in the computational advancements of mental health analysis to build responsible AI models for a complex interplay between language use and self-perception. Such responsible AI models aid in quantifying the psychological concepts from user-penned texts on social media. On thinking beyond the low-level (classification) task, we advance the existing binary classification dataset, towards a higher-level task of reliability analysis through the lens of explanations, posing it as one of the safety measures. We annotate the LoST dataset to capture nuanced textual cues that suggest the presence of low self-esteem in the posts of Reddit users. We further state that the NLP models developed for determining the presence of low self-esteem, focus more on three types of textual cues: (i) Trigger: words that triggers mental disturbance, (ii) LoST indicators: text indicators emphasizing low self-esteem, and (iii) Consequences: words describing the consequences of mental disturbance. We implement existing classifiers to examine the attention mechanism in pre-trained language models (PLMs) for a domain-specific psychology-grounded task. Our findings suggest the need of shifting the focus of PLMs from Trigger and Consequences to a more comprehensive explanation, emphasizing LoST indicators while determining low self-esteem in Reddit posts.

Muskan Garg, Chandni Saxena, Debabrata Samanta et al.

Social media is a potential source of information that infers latent mental states through Natural Language Processing (NLP). While narrating real-life experiences, social media users convey their feeling of loneliness or isolated lifestyle, impacting their mental well-being. Existing literature on psychological theories points to loneliness as the major consequence of interpersonal risk factors, propounding the need to investigate loneliness as a major aspect of mental disturbance. We formulate lonesomeness detection in social media posts as an explainable binary classification problem, discovering the users at-risk, suggesting the need of resilience for early control. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing explainable dataset, i.e., one with human-readable, annotated text spans, to facilitate further research and development in loneliness detection causing mental disturbance. In this work, three experts: a senior clinical psychologist, a rehabilitation counselor, and a social NLP researcher define annotation schemes and perplexity guidelines to mark the presence or absence of lonesomeness, along with the marking of text-spans in original posts as explanation, in 3,521 Reddit posts. We expect the public release of our dataset, LonXplain, and traditional classifiers as baselines via GitHub.

Muskan Garg, Amirmohammad Shahbandegan, Amrit Chadha et al.

With a surge in identifying suicidal risk and its severity in social media posts, we argue that a more consequential and explainable research is required for optimal impact on clinical psychology practice and personalized mental healthcare. The success of computational intelligence techniques for inferring mental illness from social media resources, points to natural language processing as a lens for determining Interpersonal Risk Factors (IRF) in human writings. Motivated with limited availability of datasets for social NLP research community, we construct and release a new annotated dataset with human-labelled explanations and classification of IRF affecting mental disturbance on social media: (i) Thwarted Belongingness (TBe), and (ii) Perceived Burdensomeness (PBu). We establish baseline models on our dataset facilitating future research directions to develop real-time personalized AI models by detecting patterns of TBe and PBu in emotional spectrum of user's historical social media profile.

Gunjan Ansari, Muskan Garg, Chandni Saxena

The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user generated text on social media platforms. Academic re searchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain specific user generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional BERT, and Back Translation (BT) as the potential techniques for generating additional text to improve the performance of classifiers. Further, three different classifiers Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) are employed for analyzing the impact of data augmentation on two publicly available social media datasets. The experiments mental results show significant improvements in classifiers performance when trained on the augmented data.

Muskan Garg

Amid lockdown period more people express their feelings over social media platforms due to closed third-place and academic researchers have witnessed strong associations between the mental healthcare and social media posts. The stress for a brief period may lead to clinical depressions and the long-lasting traits of prevailing depressions can be life threatening with suicidal ideation as the possible outcome. The increasing concern towards the rise in number of suicide cases is because it is one of the leading cause of premature but preventable death. Recent studies have shown that mining social media data has helped in quantifying the suicidal tendency of users at risk. This potential manuscript elucidates the taxonomy of mental healthcare and highlights some recent attempts in examining the potential of quantifying suicidal tendency on social media data. This manuscript presents the classification of heterogeneous features from social media data and handling feature vector representation. Aiming to identify the new research directions and advances in the development of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) based models, a quantitative synthesis and a qualitative review was carried out with corpus of over 77 potential research articles related to stress, depression and suicide risk from 2013 to 2021.