When Consistency Becomes Bias: Interviewer Effects in Semi-Structured Clinical Interviews

The paper examines automatic depression detection from doctor‑patient conversations and finds that models trained on semi‑structured interview data can achieve high accuracy by exploiting fixed interviewer prompts rather than the participants’ language. Across three datasets (ANDROIDS, DAIC‑WOZ, E‑DAIC), the authors show that restricting models to participant utterances distributes decision evidence more broadly and reflects genuine linguistic cues. The study highlights a cross‑dataset, architecture‑agnostic bias introduced by interviewer prompts and calls for analyses that localize decision evidence by time and speaker to ensure models learn from participants’ language.

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