arXiv Machine Learning

Cross-Platform Generalisation Failure in Mental Health Natural Language Processing: A Five-Axis Fairness Audit of Transformer Models on Social Media

The authors present the Cross-Platform Fairness Evaluation (CPFE) framework, a five‑axis audit protocol that assesses discriminative performance, calibration, statistical significance, prediction equity, and attribution stability of transformer models. Applying CPFE to four models trained on a Kaggle mental‑health corpus and tested on Reddit and Twitter, they find substantial cross‑platform degradation in AUC (30–40%) and severe calibration failures (ECE rising to 0.5 on Twitter). The study demonstrates that platform‑specific temperature scaling can largely fix calibration without harming discrimination, while prediction equity and attribution stability analyses reveal significant disparities and vocabulary divergence across platforms. The results argue that cross‑platform validation across all CPFE axes should become a standard requirement for mental‑health NLP systems deployed in heterogeneous environments.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

The Divergence Hypothesis: Unmasking Lexical Interference and Label Bias in Mental Health NLP

The paper introduces TSS (Triple-Stream Stress probe), a diagnostic framework that splits text into lexical, morpho-syntactic, and psycholinguistic style channels to analyze mental health NLP classifiers. Across four English datasets, TSS uncovers a lexical interference effect where adding lexical features harms performance on human-labeled data but not on auto-labeled data, and proposes the Degree of Divergence (DoD) statistic to audit label-source bias. The study demonstrates that style features largely remain effective even after masking content words, emphasizing that shortcut learning is label-source specific rather than clinically relevant.

By Moustafa Yehia Hassan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Reading Anxiety or Reading the Label? Comparing Fine-Tuned and Frontier Models for Anxiety Detection on Social Media

The study compares six approaches—frontier commercial models, fine‑tuned smaller models, and conventional classifiers—for detecting anxiety in Reddit posts. It reveals a significant lexical bias: 69.3% of anxiety‑labelled posts contain the word "anxiety" or a variant, allowing models to perform well via keyword matching rather than true language understanding. After removing these terms, the frontier model still leads (F1 = 0.846), but a 110 M‑parameter domain‑adapted encoder achieves a close score (F1 = 0.831) without external API calls, and lexical dependence varies widely across models.

By Cris Huynh, Arlene Pham
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

A Multi-Branch Feature Fusion Approach for Health Misinformation Detection and Propagation

This paper introduces a multi‑branch fusion framework that combines transformer‑based semantics, rhetorical cues, stance representations, and psychologically motivated proxies to detect health misinformation and characterize its spread on online social networks. The authors propose an interpretable Cognitive Propagation Score (CPS) derived from text cues that estimate argument complexity, emotional intensity, and virality potential, aiding diffusion‑risk reasoning when engagement data are missing. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (Constraint, COVID‑19_FNIR, Monkeypox) demonstrate near‑perfect classification and ranking performance, with ablation studies showing complementary gains from psychological and rhetorical components.

By Mkululi Sikosana, Sean Maudsley-Barton, Oluwaseun Ajao
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Natural Language Processing Psychometrics

arXiv:2608. 07316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) models predicting mental health outcomes rarely specify what they measure: contextual knowledge, emotional content, or syntactic structure.

By Edoardo Sebastiano De Duro, Emma Franchino, Massimo Stella
arXiv AI
Aug 13

A corpus-specific clinical RAG system matches or outperforms newer frontier LLMs on HealthBench

arXiv:2608. 12138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) have recently been reported to match or exceed specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks, but such comparisons draw on a narrow set of systems and on benchmarks developed largely in high-income settings.

By Praveen Reddy, Charuta Mandke, Suvrankar Datta, Sarah Khan, Siddharth Reddy Anthireddy, Shitij Arora, Vishal Singh
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Multi-Task QLoRA

The paper presents a system for the IEEE BigData 2026 Cup on Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media. It tackles three tasks—risk-level classification, evidence phrase extraction, and multi-label factor identification—using Qwen2.5-Instruct models adapted with quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) and an answer-masked causal language-model objective. The final system achieved a composite score of 0.7738, with 0.8089 on Task 1 and 0.6919 on Task 2, demonstrating that task‑specific training and tailored aggregation improve performance across the three tasks.

By Xuan Zhong Feng, Geoffrey Martin, Hexin Dong, Yifan Peng
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts

The study evaluates how well three sentiment‑analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, Twitter‑roBERTa‑base) and three large language models (Qwen3‑32B, GPT‑OSS‑120B, Llama‑4‑Maverick‑17B) agree with six human raters on 100 tweets. Agreement was measured with Cohen’s and Fleiss’ kappa, revealing only fair inter‑human agreement and higher concordance for binary sentiment labels than for three‑class labels. Twitter‑roBERTa‑base achieved the strongest alignment with humans, especially for negative versus non‑negative sentiment, while the LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, particularly for positive versus non‑positive classifications. The findings emphasize that domain‑specific fine‑tuning and human‑centered evaluation are essential for reliable social media sentiment analysis.

By Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Sivakanesan Dhanushkanda, Shuai Hao, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Aligning with Lived Experience: Heterogeneous Benefits of Fine Tuning in Mental Health Support Generation

The paper introduces the COmmunity-centered Peer Engaged Support (COPES) dataset and a three‑axis evaluation framework to gauge how well Large Language Models (LLMs) align with community perspectives on mental‑health support queries. Experiments show that fine‑tuning LLMs on COPES improves strategy alignment and emotion‑tone alignment by over 50% for general‑purpose models, yet these gains are uneven across subreddits and coping strategies. The study also finds that post‑training shifts the model’s recommendations toward problem‑focused advice while reducing emotion‑focused responses, indicating persistent disparities in performance across different communities and needs.

By Mohit Chandra, Nabin Kim, Eli Min, Aamogh Sawant, Tanmay Sutar, Munmun De Choudhury