A new language‑processing tool has been developed to estimate suicide risk from natural language. By analyzing text, the tool can identify individuals at the highest risk. This capability could enable faster and more targeted interventions.
By Jennifer Michalowski | McGovern Institute for Brain Research
The paper introduces DistressBench, a benchmark comprising 718 English clinician-authored conversations covering 23 self-harm subcategories, each evaluated against a weighted rubric across seven crisis-support dimensions. Models are scored by the fraction of criteria they satisfy, revealing that the best models meet 88.4% of weighted criteria while clinicians achieve 98.7%. The study highlights gaps in crisis response, notably that 35.3% of conversations where crisis is recognized fail to route users to human help, underscoring the need to evaluate models on supportive care rather than mere refusal.
By Drew Rein, Patrick Oathout, Vishal Kumar, Udari Madhushani Sehwag
arXiv:2608.01291v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present ArabicDialectSafety, a human-curated Arabic safety dataset of 25,071 prompts covering six Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic, Syri...
By Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Mabrouka Bessghaier
arXiv:2603.04410v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: While different stakeholders are trying to leverage Arabic Language Models (ALMs), safety alignment in ALMs remains largely underexplored, hi...
By Omar Abdelnasser, Fatemah Alharbi, Khaled Khasawneh, Ihsen Alouani, Mohammed E. Fouda
arXiv:2608.21985v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As the adoption of large language models (LLMs) grows in Arabic-speaking regions, ensuring their safety and cultural alignment is increasingly critical...
By Fidaa Abed, Haidar Khan, M Saiful Bari, Babar Khan, Abdalghani Abujabal
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