Sannidhya Das
2025
Identifying Severity of Depression in Forum Posts using Zero-Shot Classifier and DistilBERT Model
Zafar Sarif
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Sannidhya Das
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Dr. Abhishek Das
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Md Fahin Parvej
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Dipankar Das
Proceedings of the First on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities
This paper presents our approach to the RANLP 2025 Shared Task on “Identification of the Severity of Depression in Forum Posts.” The objective of the task is to classify user-generated posts into one of four severity levels of depression: subthreshold, mild, moderate, or severe. A key challenge in the task was the absence of annotated training data. To address this, we employed a two-stage pipeline: first, we used zero-shot classification with facebook/bart-large-mnli to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled training set. Next, we fine-tuned a DistilBERT model on the pseudo-labeled data for multi-class classification. Our system achieved an internal accuracy of 0.92 on the pseudo-labeled test set and an accuracy of 0.289 on the official blind evaluation set. These results demonstrate the feasibility of leveraging zero-shot learning and weak supervision for mental health classification tasks, even in the absence of gold-standard annotations.