MentSum: A Resource for Exploring Summarization of Mental Health Online Posts

Sajad Sotudeh, Nazli Goharian, Zachary Young


Abstract
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the community and counselors. Some of these platforms, such as Reachout, are dedicated forums where the users register to seek help. Others such as Reddit provide subreddits where the users publicly but anonymously post their mental health distress. Although posts are of varying length, it is beneficial to provide a short, but informative summary for fast processing by the counselors. To facilitate research in summarization of mental health online posts, we introduce Mental Health Summarization dataset, MentSum, containing over 24k carefully selected user posts from Reddit, along with their short user-written summary (called TLDR) in English from 43 mental health subreddits. This domain-specific dataset could be of interest not only for generating short summaries on Reddit, but also for generating summaries of posts on the dedicated mental health forums such as Reachout. We further evaluate both extractive and abstractive state-of-the-art summarization baselines in terms of Rouge scores, and finally conduct an in-depth human evaluation study of both user-written and system-generated summaries, highlighting challenges in this research.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.287
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2682–2692
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.287
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sajad Sotudeh, Nazli Goharian, and Zachary Young. 2022. MentSum: A Resource for Exploring Summarization of Mental Health Online Posts. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2682–2692, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
MentSum: A Resource for Exploring Summarization of Mental Health Online Posts (Sotudeh et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.287.pdf
Data
MentSum