ADHD-Lang: A Large-Scale Social Media Dataset for Verbal Behavior and Digital Phenotyping in Adult ADHD

Daniel Wiechmann, Elma Kerz, Edward Kempa, Yu Qiao


Abstract
We introduce ADHD-Lang, a large-scale language resource derived from Reddit to advance computational phenotyping of adult ADHD. The corpus is constructed using a high-precision self-disclosure pattern to confirm ADHD diagnoses and a matched control cohort, comprising 12,070 ADHD users (317,073 posts; 2.83M sentences) and 12,070 controls (174,765 posts; 1.27M sentences). In releasing ADHD-Lang to the research community, we also provide the first comprehensive baseline results, systematically examining the accuracy–transparency trade-off across three model families: (1) interpretable shallow machine learning models trained on clinically meaningful, expert-engineered language biomarkers; (2) a deep BiLSTM network trained on the same feature representations to capture temporal dynamics across users’ posts; and (3) black-box transformer-based models (BERT, RoBERTa, MentalRoBERTa) leveraging contextual embeddings—non-interpretable, high-dimensional representations. ADHD-Lang is released as a standardized benchmark to promote reproducible research and accelerate progress toward digital verbal-behavior phenotyping for adult ADHD.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.577
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7279–7291
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-577
DOI:
10.63317/3uw9c6ux3f7j
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Wiechmann, Elma Kerz, Edward Kempa, and Yu Qiao. 2026. ADHD-Lang: A Large-Scale Social Media Dataset for Verbal Behavior and Digital Phenotyping in Adult ADHD. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7279–7291, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
ADHD-Lang: A Large-Scale Social Media Dataset for Verbal Behavior and Digital Phenotyping in Adult ADHD (Wiechmann et al., LREC 2026)
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