Depression Detection in Modern Greek

Vivian Stamou, George Mikros, George Markopoulos, Spyridoula Varlokosta


Abstract
Despite advancements in NLP-based mental health screening, research remains predominantly English-centric, leaving under-resourced languages insufficiently explored. This study investigates depression detection in Modern Greek social media through a series of experiments. We benchmark traditional machine learning (ML) models against transformer architectures (GreekBERT, GreekSocialBERT, mBERT, and XLM-R) under two settings: a topic-oriented control corpus and a high-similarity stress-test contrasting a gold case of a depressed user with a matched control. Transformer models consistently outperform ML models (F1 = 0.95) but offer limited interpretability. To address this limitation, we incorporate LIWC-derived psycholinguistic features with SHAP explanations to examine model behavior in relation to established linguistic markers. The analysis reveals linguistic patterns consistent with depressive symptoms, such as reduced work-related engagement, social withdrawal, and the motivational deficits characteristically linked to anhedonia in clinical literature. Overall, the results provide a baseline for depression detection in Modern Greek and underscore the importance of grounding automated screening in clinically interpretable evidence.
Anthology ID:
2026.rapid-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments in cooperation with the MENTAL.ai consortium
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Dimitrios Kokkinakis, Charalambos Themistocleous, Gaël Dias, Kathleen C. Fraser, Fredrik Öhman, Sebastião Pais
Venues:
RaPID | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
106–114
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-rapid6mentalai-09
DOI:
10.63317/2gdmrug2fvmw
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivian Stamou, George Mikros, George Markopoulos, and Spyridoula Varlokosta. 2026. Depression Detection in Modern Greek. In Proceedings of the Sixth Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments in cooperation with the MENTAL.ai consortium, pages 106–114, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Depression Detection in Modern Greek (Stamou et al., RaPID 2026)
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