arXiv AI
Sep 3

Interpretable Symptom Vectors for Depression in a Large Language Model

The study investigates how a large language model, Gemma-3-27B-PT, internally represents depressive symptoms. By applying mechanistic interpretability methods to the model’s residual stream, researchers found that symptom groups are geometrically distinct at layer 21, and that projected symptom vectors align with clinician-annotated rankings across mood, somatic, and suicidality dimensions. Additionally, a single depression vector at this layer can differentiate depressive from non-depressive text with an AUC of 0.789, suggesting a potential emotional valence gate for symptom projection.

By Fangyi Zhu, Ajay Subramanian, Allison Constant, Camille Wang, Ravish Gupta, Corey J. Keller
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Multilingual Lexical Feature Analysis of Spoken Language for Predicting Major Depression Symptom Severity

arXiv:2511.07011v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Background: Remotely captured spoken language could provide objective, regular indicators of depression symptom severity. However, research t...

By Anastasiia Tokareva, Judith Dineley, Zoe Firth, Pauline Conde, Faith Matcham, Sara Siddi, Femke Lamers, Ewan Carr, Carolin Oetzmann, Daniel Leightley, Yuezhou Zhang, Amos A. Folarin, Josep Maria Haro, Brenda W. J. H. Penninx, Raquel Bailon, Srinivasan Vairavan, Til Wykes, Richard J. B. Dobson, Vaibhav A. Narayan, Matthew Hotopf, Nicholas Cummins, The RADAR-CNS Consortium
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Reduplicative constructions in Mandarin: Socio-emotional profiling through distributional semantics

The paper investigates Mandarin Chinese reduplicative constructions that repeat two-character base words or their constituents, such as expressions meaning ‘in good health’ or ‘discuss a bit’. Using Tencent word embeddings, the study demonstrates that distributional semantics can recover known semantic and grammatical properties of these reduplications, revealing clear semantic and pragmatic differentiation between the two patterns. Procrustes analysis shows that the overall organization of the base-word space is largely preserved in the reduplication space, with local mismatches indicating discourse-pragmatic reorganization.

By Chaoyi Wu, Yu-Hsiang Tseng, R. Harald Baayen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Candidate Generation and Definition-Guided Verification for Sentence-Level Depression Symptom Recognition

The paper introduces a two‑stage framework for recognizing depression symptoms at the sentence level. First, a contrastively fine‑tuned sentence encoder generates a symptom candidate for each sentence. Then, a fine‑tuned language model verifies the candidate’s presence or absence by comparing the sentence, its context, and a diagnostic definition, ensuring the model’s judgment aligns with that definition before responding.

By Weiming Li, Catarina Barata, Miguel Constante, Joao Sanches