LOST: A Mental Health Dataset of Low Self-esteem in Reddit Posts

Low self-esteem and interpersonal needs (i.e., thwarted belongingness (TB) and perceived burdensomeness (PB)) have a major impact on depression and suicide attempts. Individuals seek social connectedness on social media to boost and alleviate their loneliness. Social media platforms allow people to express their thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and emotions. Prior studies on mental health from social media have focused on symptoms, causes, and disorders. Whereas an initial screening of social media content for interpersonal risk factors and low self-esteem may raise early alerts and assign therapists to at-risk users of mental disturbance. Standardized scales measure self-esteem and interpersonal needs from questions created using psychological theories. In the current research, we introduce a psychology-grounded and expertly annotated dataset, LoST: Low Self esTeem, to study and detect low self-esteem on Reddit. Through an annotation approach involving checks on coherence, correctness, consistency, and reliability, we ensure gold-standard for supervised learning. We present results from different deep language models tested using two data augmentation techniques. Our findings suggest developing a class of language models that infuses psychological and clinical knowledge

Demo Alleviate: Demonstrating Artificial Intelligence Enabled Virtual Assistance for Telehealth: The Mental Health Case

After the pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) powered support for mental health care has become increasingly important. The breadth and complexity of significant challenges required to provide adequate care involve: (a) Personalized patient understanding, (b) Safety-constrained and medically validated chatbot patient interactions, and (c) Support for continued feedback-based refinements in design using chatbot-patient interactions. We propose Alleviate, a chatbot designed to assist patients suffering from mental health challenges with personalized care and assist clinicians with understanding their patients better. Alleviate draws from an array of publicly available clinically valid mental-health texts and databases, allowing Alleviate to make medically sound and informed decisions. In addition, Alleviate\u27s modular design and explainable decision-making lends itself to robust and continued feedback-based refinements to its design. In this paper, we explain the different modules of Alleviate and submit a short video demonstrating Alleviate\u27s capabilities to help patients and clinicians understand each other better to facilitate optimal care strategies

K-PERM: Personalized Response Generation Using Dynamic Knowledge Retrieval and Persona-Adaptive Queries

Personalizing conversational agents can enhance the quality of conversations and increase user engagement. However, they often lack external knowledge to tend to a user’s persona appropriately. This is particularly crucial for practical applications like mental health support, nutrition planning, culturally sensitive conversations, or reducing toxic behavior in conversational agents. To enhance the relevance and comprehensiveness of personalized responses, we propose using a two-step approach that involves (1) selectively integrating user personas and (2) contextualizing the response with supplementing information from a background knowledge source. We develop K-PERM (Knowledge-guided PErsonalization with Reward Modulation), a dynamic conversational agent that combines these elements. K-PERM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the popular Fo- Cus dataset, containing real-world personalized conversations concerning global landmarks. We show that using responses from K-PERM can improve performance in state-ofthe- art LLMs (GPT 3.5) by 10.5%, highlighting the impact of K-PERM for personalizing chatbots.

ezDI\u27s Semantics-Enhanced Linguistic, NLP, and ML Approach for Health Informatics

ezDI uses large and extensive knowledge graph to enhance linguistics, NLP and ML techniques to improve structured data extraction from millions of EMR records. It then normalizes it, and maps it with various computer-processable nomenclature such as SNOMED-CT, RxNorm, ICD-9, ICD-10, CPT, and LOINC. Furthermore, it applies advanced reasoning that exploited domain-specific and hierarchical relationships among entities in the knowledge graph to make the data actionable. These capabilities are part of its highly scalable AWS deployed heath intelligence platform that support healthcare informatics applications, including Computer Assisted Coding (CAC), Computerized Document Improvement (CDI), compliance and audit, and core measures and utilization, as well as support improved decision making that involve identification of patients at risk, patterns in diseases, outcome prediction, etc. This paper focuses on the key role of its semantic approach and techniques

K-PERM: Personalized Response Generation Using Dynamic Knowledge Retrieval and Persona-Adaptive Queries

Personalizing conversational agents can enhance the quality of conversations and increase user engagement. However, they often lack external knowledge to appropriately tend to a user’s persona. This is crucial for practical applications like mental health support, nutrition planning, culturally sensitive conversations, or reducing toxic behavior in conversational agents. To enhance the relevance and comprehensiveness of personalized responses, we propose using a two-step approach that involves (1) selectively integrating user personas and (2) contextualizing the response by supplementing information from a background knowledge source. We develop K-PERM (Knowledge-guided PErsonalization with Reward Modulation), a dynamic conversational agent that combines these elements. K-PERM achieves state-of-the- art performance on the popular FoCus dataset, containing real-world personalized conversations concerning global landmarks.We show that using responses from K-PERM can improve performance in state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT 3.5) by 10.5%, highlighting the impact of K-PERM for personalizing chatbots