We propose CONDOR, a weighted knowledge distillation approach that distills the information from a common-sense KG to a domain-specific KG by intelligently balancing domain relevance and generalization. We use a teacher–student distillation framework where a teacher model trained on a large common-sense knowledge graph guides a student model trained on a smaller domain-specific graph, using a combination of distillation loss and domain-specific triple completion loss to improve downstream task performance. We benchmark CONDOR on offensive speech and mental health domains across classification and generation tasks. Using COMET, pre-trained on common-sense commonsense KGs like ATOMIC and ConceptNet—as the teacher, and domain-specific KGs such as StereoKG (offensive speech) and HealKG (mental health) as student inputs, we evaluate on LatentHatred, SBIC, EDOS, and HOPE datasets. Results show that enriching domain-specific knowledge with distilled commonsense significantly improves downstream performance. Disclaimer. Some examples in the paper are offensive in nature. Reader discretion is advised.

The expression of mental health symptoms through non-traditional means, such as memes, has gained remarkable attention over the past few years, with users often highlighting their mental health struggles through figurative intricacies within memes. While humans rely on commonsense knowledge to interpret these complex expressions, current Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) struggle to capture these figurative aspects inherent in memes. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset, AxiOM, derived from the GAD anxiety questionnaire, which categorizes memes into six fine-grained anxiety symptoms. Next, we propose a commonsense and domain-enriched framework, M3H, to enhance MLMs' ability to interpret figurative language and commonsense knowledge. The overarching goal remains to first understand and then classify the mental health symptoms expressed in memes. We benchmark M3H against 6 competitive baselines (with 20 variations), demonstrating improvements in both quantitative and qualitative metrics, including a detailed human evaluation. We observe a clear improvement of 4.20% and 4.66% on weighted-F1 metric. To assess the generalizability, we perform extensive experiments on a public dataset, RESTORE, for depressive symptom identification, presenting an ablation study that highlights the contribution of each module. Our findings reveal limitations in existing models and the advantage of employing commonsense to enhance figurative understanding.

Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) have become a prevalent method for receiving mental health counseling in the digital healthcare space. An assistive counseling conversation commences with natural open-ended topics to familiarize the client with the environment and later converges into more fine-grained domain-specific topics. Unlike other conversational systems, which are categorized as open-domain or task-oriented systems, VMHAs possess a hybrid conversational flow. These counseling bots need to comprehend various aspects of the conversation, such as dialogue-acts, intents, etc., to engage the client in an effective and appropriate conversation. Although the surge in digital health research highlights applications of many general-purpose response generation systems, they are barely suitable in the mental health domain – the prime reason is the lack of understanding in the mental health counseling conversation. Moreover, in general, dialogue-act guided response generators are either limited to a template-based paradigm or lack appropriate semantics in dialogue generation. To this end, we propose READER – a REsponse-Act guided reinforced Dialogue genERation model for the mental health counseling conversations. READER is built on transformer to jointly predict a potential dialogue-act dt + 1 for the next utterance (aka response-act) and to generate an appropriate response (ut + 1). Through the transformer-reinforcement-learning (TRL) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), we guide the response generator to abide by dt + 1 and ensure the semantic richness of the responses via BERTScore in our reward computation. We evaluate READER on HOPE, a benchmark counseling conversation dataset and observe that it outperforms several baselines across several evaluation metrics – METEOR, ROUGE, and BERTScore.

Curbing online hate speech has become the need of the hour; however, a blanket ban on such activities is infeasible for several geopolitical and cultural reasons. To reduce the severity of the problem, in this paper, we introduce a novel task, hate speech normalization, that aims to weaken the intensity of hatred exhibited by an online post. The intention of hate speech normalization is not to support hate but instead to provide the users with a stepping stone towards non-hate while giving online platforms more time to monitor any improvement in the user's behavior. To this end, we manually curated a parallel corpus - hate texts and their normalized counterparts (a normalized text is less hateful and more benign). We introduce NACL, a simple yet efficient hate speech normalization model that operates in three stages - first, it measures the hate intensity of the original sample; second, it identifies the hate span(s) within it; and finally, it reduces hate intensity by paraphrasing the hate spans. We perform extensive experiments to measure the efficacy of NACL via three-way evaluation (intrinsic, extrinsic, and human-study). We observe that NACL outperforms six baselines - NACL yields a score of 0.1365 RMSE for the intensity prediction, 0.622 F1-score in the span identification, and 82.27 BLEU and 80.05 perplexity for the normalized text generation. We further show the generalizability of NACL across other platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Gab). An interactive prototype of NACL was put together for the user study. Further, the tool is being deployed in a real-world setting at Wipro AI as a part of its mission to tackle harmful content on online platforms.

The psychotherapy intervention technique is a multifaceted conversation between a therapist and a patient. Unlike general clinical discussions, psychotherapy's core components (viz. symptoms) are hard to distinguish, thus becoming a complex problem to summarize later. A structured counseling conversation may contain discussions about symptoms, history of mental health issues, or the discovery of the patient's behavior. It may also contain discussion filler words irrelevant to a clinical summary. We refer to these elements of structured psychotherapy as counseling components. In this paper, the aim is mental health counseling summarization to build upon domain knowledge and to help clinicians quickly glean meaning. We create a new dataset after annotating 12.9K utterances of counseling components and reference summaries for each dialogue. Further, we propose ConSum, a novel counseling-component guided summarization model. ConSum undergoes three independent modules. First, to assess the presence of depressive symptoms, it filters utterances utilizing the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), while the second and third modules aim to classify counseling components. At last, we propose a problem-specific Mental Health Information Capture (MHIC) evaluation metric for counseling summaries. Our comparative study shows that we improve on performance and generate cohesive, semantic, and coherent summaries. We comprehensively analyze the generated summaries to investigate the capturing of psychotherapy elements. Human and clinical evaluations on the summary show that ConSum generates quality summary. Further, mental health experts validate the clinical acceptability of the ConSum. Lastly, we discuss the uniqueness in mental health counseling summarization in the real world and show evidences of its deployment on an online application with the support of mpathic.ai

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the mental health of people under risk. Social counselling has gained remarkable significance in this environment. Unlike general goal-oriented dialogues, a conversation between a patient and a therapist is considerably implicit, though the objective of the conversation is quite apparent. In such a case, understanding the intent of the patient is imperative in providing effective counselling in therapy sessions, and the same applies to a dialogue system as well. In this work, we take forward a small but an important step in the development of an automated dialogue system for mental-health counselling. We develop a novel dataset, named HOPE, to provide a platform for the dialogue-act classification in counselling conversations. We identify the requirement of such conversation and propose twelve domain-specific dialogue-act (DAC) labels. We collect ~ 12.9K utterances from publicly-available counselling session videos on YouTube, extract their transcripts, clean, and annotate them with DAC labels. Further, we propose SPARTA, a transformer-based architecture with a novel speaker- and time-aware contextual learning for the dialogue-act classification. Our evaluation shows convincing performance over several baselines, achieving state-of-the-art on HOPE. We also supplement our experiments with extensive empirical and qualitative analyses of SPARTA.

The formulation of a claim rests at the core of argument mining. To demarcate between a claim and a non-claim is arduous for both humans and machines, owing to latent linguistic variance between the two and the inadequacy of extensive definition-based formalization. Furthermore, the increase in the usage of online social media has resulted in an explosion of unsolicited information on the web presented as informal text. To account for the aforementioned, in this paper, we propose DESYR. It is a framework that intends on annulling the said issues for informal web-based text by leveraging a combination of hierarchical representation learning (dependency-inspired Poincaré embedding), definition-based alignment, and feature projection. We do away with fine-tuning compute-heavy language models in favor of fabricating a more domain-centric but lighter approach. Experimental results indicate that DESYR builds upon the state-of-the-art system across four benchmark claim datasets, most of which were constructed with informal texts. We see an increase of 3 claim-F1 points on the LESA-Twitter dataset, an increase of 1 claim-F1 point and 9 macro-F1 points on the Online Comments (OC) dataset, an increase of 24 claim-F1 points and 17 macro-F1 points on the Web Discourse (WD) dataset, and an increase of 8 claim-F1 points and 5 macro-F1 points on the Micro Texts (MT) dataset. We also perform an extensive analysis of the results. We make a 100-D pre-trained version of our Poincaré-variant along with the source code.

Multi-modal affect analysis (e.g., sentiment and emotion analysis) is an interdisciplinary study and has been an emerging and prominent field in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. The effective fusion of multiple modalities (e.g., text , acoustic, or visual frames ) is a non-trivial task, as these modalities, often, carry distinct and diverse information, and do not contribute equally. The issue further escalates when these data contain noise. In this article, we study the concept of multi-task learning for multi-modal affect analysis and explore a contextual inter-modal attention framework that aims to leverage the association among the neighboring utterances and their multi-modal information. In general, sentiments and emotions have inter-dependence on each other (e.g., anger → negative or happy → positive ). In our current work, we exploit the relatedness among the participating tasks in the multi-task framework. We define three different multi-task setups, each having two tasks, i.e., sentiment 8 emotion classification, sentiment classification 8 sentiment intensity prediction, and emotion classificati on 8 emotion intensity prediction. Our evaluation of the proposed system on the CMU-Multi-modal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity benchmark dataset suggests that, in comparison with the single-task learning framework, our multi-task framework yields better performance for the inter-related participating tasks. Further, comparative studies show that our proposed approach attains state-of-the-art performance for most of the cases.