Discourse-Level Representations can Improve Prediction of Degree of Anxiety

Swanie Juhng, Matthew Matero, Vasudha Varadarajan, Johannes Eichstaedt, Adithya V Ganesan, H. Andrew Schwartz


Abstract
Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1500–1511
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.128
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.128
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Swanie Juhng, Matthew Matero, Vasudha Varadarajan, Johannes Eichstaedt, Adithya V Ganesan, and H. Andrew Schwartz. 2023. Discourse-Level Representations can Improve Prediction of Degree of Anxiety. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1500–1511, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discourse-Level Representations can Improve Prediction of Degree of Anxiety (Juhng et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.128.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.128.mp4