The visible and the latent linguistic clues of mental health in Brazilian Portuguese textual posts

Rodrigo Wilkens, Helena Caseli, Vania Neris, Aline Villavicencio


Abstract
Depressive symptomatology may be reflected in the language used by possible depressive profiles (PDP). This paper investigates to what extent symptoms of depression are manifested in Brazilian Portuguese narrative texts, and whether these can be used to identify relevant linguistic clues related to PDP. Moreover, the relation between these symptoms and PDP is explored, characterising the lexical, syntactic, and psycholinguistic aspects of texts produced by PDP. We found that texts associated with PDPs differed in some of these characteristics from non-PDP texts. The interactions between symptoms and PDP can also shed light on patterns of communication differentiation and the relationship between them. The results of this paper can help to characterise and understand the indicators that can be used to train more bespoke and accurate large language models.
Anthology ID:
2026.propor-2.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2
Month:
April
Year:
2026
Address:
Salvador, Brazil
Editors:
Marlo Souza, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Diana Santos, Larissa Freitas, Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza, Eugénio Ribeiro
Venue:
PROPOR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
135–147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.21/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rodrigo Wilkens, Helena Caseli, Vania Neris, and Aline Villavicencio. 2026. The visible and the latent linguistic clues of mental health in Brazilian Portuguese textual posts. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2, pages 135–147, Salvador, Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The visible and the latent linguistic clues of mental health in Brazilian Portuguese textual posts (Wilkens et al., PROPOR 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.21.pdf