Due to the rapid growth of user interaction on different social media platforms, publicly available social media data has increased substantially. The sheer amount of data and level of personal information being shared on such platforms has made analyzing textual information to predict mental disorders such as depression a reliable preliminary step when it comes to psychometrics. In this study, we first proposed a system to search for texts that are related to depression symptoms from the Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI) questionnaire, and providing a ranking for further investigation in a second step. Then, in this second step, we address the even more challenging task of automatic depression level detection, using writings and voluntary answers provided by users on Reddit. Several Large Language Models (LLMs) were applied in experiments. Our proposed system based on LLMs can generate both predictions and explanations for each question. By combining two LLMs for different questions, we achieved better performance on three of four metrics compared to the state-of-the-art and remained competitive on the one remaining metric. In addition, our system is explainable on two levels: first, knowing the answers to the BDI questions provides clues about the possible symptoms that could lead to a clinical diagnosis of depression; second, our system can explain the predicted answer for each question.

Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialog data is difficult, especially for highly specific domains that require expert knowledge. At the same time, informal communication channels such as instant messengers are increasingly being used at work. This has led to a lot of work-relevant information that is disseminated through those channels and needs to be post-processed manually by the employees. To alleviate this problem, we present TexPrax, a messaging system to collect and annotate _problems_, _causes_, and _solutions_ that occur in work-related chats. TexPrax uses a chatbot to directly engage the employees to provide lightweight annotations on their conversation and ease their documentation work. To comply with data privacy and security regulations, we use an end-to-end message encryption and give our users full control over their data which has various advantages over conventional annotation tools. We evaluate TexPrax in a user-study with German factory employees who ask their colleagues for solutions on problems that arise during their daily work. Overall, we collect 202 task-oriented German dialogues containing 1,027 sentences with sentence-level expert annotations. Our data analysis also reveals that real-world conversations frequently contain instances with code-switching, varying abbreviations for the same entity, and dialects which NLP systems should be able to handle.