Fine-grained Speech Sentiment Analysis in Chinese Psychological Support Hotlines Based on Large-scale Pre-trained Model

Suicide and suicidal behaviors remain significant challenges for public policy and healthcare. In response, psychological support hotlines have been established worldwide to provide immediate help to individuals in mental crises. The effectiveness of these hotlines largely depends on accurately identifying callers' emotional states, particularly underlying negative emotions indicative of increased suicide risk. However, the high demand for psychological interventions often results in a shortage of professional operators, highlighting the need for an effective speech emotion recognition model. This model would automatically detect and analyze callers' emotions, facilitating integration into hotline services. Additionally, it would enable large-scale data analysis of psychological support hotline interactions to explore psychological phenomena and behaviors across populations. Our study utilizes data from the Beijing psychological support hotline, the largest suicide hotline in China. We analyzed speech data from 105 callers containing 20,630 segments and categorized them into 11 types of negative emotions. We developed a negative emotion recognition model and a fine-grained multi-label classification model using a large-scale pre-trained model. Our experiments indicate that the negative emotion recognition model achieves a maximum F1-score of 76.96%. However, it shows limited efficacy in the fine-grained multi-label classification task, with the best model achieving only a 41.74% weighted F1-score. We conducted an error analysis for this task, discussed potential future improvements, and considered the clinical application possibilities of our study. All the codes are public available.

SOS-1K: A Fine-grained Suicide Risk Classification Dataset for Chinese Social Media Analysis

In the social media, users frequently express personal emotions, a subset of which may indicate potential suicidal tendencies. The implicit and varied forms of expression in internet language complicate accurate and rapid identification of suicidal intent on social media, thus creating challenges for timely intervention efforts. The development of deep learning models for suicide risk detection is a promising solution, but there is a notable lack of relevant datasets, especially in the Chinese context. To address this gap, this study presents a Chinese social media dataset designed for fine-grained suicide risk classification, focusing on indicators such as expressions of suicide intent, methods of suicide, and urgency of timing. Seven pre-trained models were evaluated in two tasks: high and low suicide risk, and fine-grained suicide risk classification on a level of 0 to 10. In our experiments, deep learning models show good performance in distinguishing between high and low suicide risk, with the best model achieving an F1 score of 88.39%. However, the results for fine-grained suicide risk classification were still unsatisfactory, with an weighted F1 score of 50.89%. To address the issues of data imbalance and limited dataset size, we investigated both traditional and advanced, large language model based data augmentation techniques, demonstrating that data augmentation can enhance model performance by up to 4.65% points in F1-score. Notably, the Chinese MentalBERT model, which was pre-trained on psychological domain data, shows superior performance in both tasks. This study provides valuable insights for automatic identification of suicidal individuals, facilitating timely psychological intervention on social media platforms. The source code and data are publicly available.

AI-Enhanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Deep Learning and Large Language Models for Extracting Cognitive Pathways from Social Media Texts

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an effective technique for addressing the irrational thoughts stemming from mental illnesses, but it necessitates precise identification of cognitive pathways to be successfully implemented in patient care. In current society, individuals frequently express negative emotions on social media on specific topics, often exhibiting cognitive distortions, including suicidal behaviors in extreme cases. Yet, there is a notable absence of methodologies for analyzing cognitive pathways that could aid psychotherapists in conducting effective interventions online. In this study, we gathered data from social media and established the task of extracting cognitive pathways, annotating the data based on a cognitive theoretical framework. We initially categorized the task of extracting cognitive pathways as a hierarchical text classification with four main categories and nineteen subcategories. Following this, we structured a text summarization task to help psychotherapists quickly grasp the essential information. Our experiments evaluate the performance of deep learning and large language models (LLMs) on these tasks. The results demonstrate that our deep learning method achieved a micro-F1 score of 62.34% in the hierarchical text classification task. Meanwhile, in the text summarization task, GPT-4 attained a Rouge-1 score of 54.92 and a Rouge-2 score of 30.86, surpassing the experimental deep learning model's performance. However, it may suffer from an issue of hallucination. We have made all models and codes publicly available to support further research in this field.

Chinese MentalBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training on Social Media for Chinese Mental Health Text Analysis

In the current environment, psychological issues are prevalent and widespread, with social media serving as a key outlet for individuals to share their feelings. This results in the generation of vast quantities of data daily, where negative emotions have the potential to precipitate crisis situations. There is a recognized need for models capable of efficient analysis. While pre-trained language models have demonstrated their effectiveness broadly, there's a noticeable gap in pre-trained models tailored for specialized domains like psychology. To address this, we have collected a huge dataset from Chinese social media platforms and enriched it with publicly available datasets to create a comprehensive database encompassing 3.36 million text entries. To enhance the model's applicability to psychological text analysis, we integrated psychological lexicons into the pre-training masking mechanism. Building on an existing Chinese language model, we performed adaptive training to develop a model specialized for the psychological domain. We assessed our model's effectiveness across four public benchmarks, where it not only surpassed the performance of standard pre-trained models but also showed a inclination for making psychologically relevant predictions. Due to concerns regarding data privacy, the dataset will not be made publicly available. However, we have made the pre-trained models and codes publicly accessible to the community via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/Chinese-MentalBERT.

Comparative Analysis of ImageNet Pre-Trained Deep Learning Models and DINOv2 in Medical Imaging Classification

Medical image analysis frequently encounters data scarcity challenges. Transfer learning has been effective in addressing this issue while conserving computational resources. The recent advent of foundational models like the DINOv2, which uses the vision transformer architecture, has opened new opportunities in the field and gathered significant interest. However, DINOv2's performance on clinical data still needs to be verified. In this paper, we performed a glioma grading task using three clinical modalities of brain MRI data. We compared the performance of various pre-trained deep learning models, including those based on ImageNet and DINOv2, in a transfer learning context. Our focus was on understanding the impact of the freezing mechanism on performance. We also validated our findings on three other types of public datasets: chest radiography, fundus radiography, and dermoscopy. Our findings indicate that in our clinical dataset, DINOv2's performance was not as strong as ImageNet-based pre-trained models, whereas in public datasets, DINOv2 generally outperformed other models, especially when using the frozen mechanism. Similar performance was observed with various sizes of DINOv2 models across different tasks. In summary, DINOv2 is viable for medical image classification tasks, particularly with data resembling natural images. However, its effectiveness may vary with data that significantly differs from natural images such as MRI. In addition, employing smaller versions of the model can be adequate for medical task, offering resource-saving benefits. Our codes are available at https://github.com/GuanghuiFU/medical_DINOv2_eval.

Shift-ConvNets: Small Convolutional Kernel with Large Kernel Effects

Recent studies reveal that the remarkable performance of Vision transformers (ViTs) benefits from large receptive fields. For this reason, the large convolutional kernel design becomes an ideal solution to make Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) great again. However, the typical large convolutional kernels turn out to be hardware-unfriendly operators, resulting in discount compatibility of various hardware platforms. Thus, it is unwise to simply enlarge the convolutional kernel size. In this paper, we reveal that small convolutional kernels and convolution operations can achieve the closing effects of large kernel sizes. Then, we propose a shift-wise operator that ensures the CNNs capture long-range dependencies with the help of the sparse mechanism, while remaining hardware-friendly. Experimental results show that our shift-wise operator significantly improves the accuracy of a regular CNN while markedly reducing computational requirements. On the ImageNet-1k, our shift-wise enhanced CNN model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Code & models at https://github.com/lidc54/shift-wiseConv.

Towards a Psychological Generalist AI: A Survey of Current Applications of Large Language Models and Future Prospects

The complexity of psychological principles underscore a significant societal challenge, given the vast social implications of psychological problems. Bridging the gap between understanding these principles and their actual clinical and real-world applications demands rigorous exploration and adept implementation. In recent times, the swift advancement of highly adaptive and reusable artificial intelligence (AI) models has emerged as a promising way to unlock unprecedented capabilities in the realm of psychology. This paper emphasizes the importance of performance validation for these large-scale AI models, emphasizing the need to offer a comprehensive assessment of their verification from diverse perspectives. Moreover, we review the cutting-edge advancements and practical implementations of these expansive models in psychology, highlighting pivotal work spanning areas such as social media analytics, clinical nursing insights, vigilant community monitoring, and the nuanced exploration of psychological theories. Based on our review, we project an acceleration in the progress of psychological fields, driven by these large-scale AI models. These future generalist AI models harbor the potential to substantially curtail labor costs and alleviate social stress. However, this forward momentum will not be without its set of challenges, especially when considering the paradigm changes and upgrades required for medical instrumentation and related applications.

CMed-GPT: Prompt Tuning for Entity-Aware Chinese Medical Dialogue Generation

Medical dialogue generation relies on natural language generation techniques to enable online medical consultations. Recently, the widespread adoption of large-scale models in the field of natural language processing has facilitated rapid advancements in this technology. Existing medical dialogue models are mostly based on BERT and pre-trained on English corpora, but there is a lack of high-performing models on the task of Chinese medical dialogue generation. To solve the above problem, this paper proposes CMed-GPT, which is the GPT pre-training language model based on Chinese medical domain text. The model is available in two versions, namely, base and large, with corresponding perplexity values of 8.64 and 8.01. Additionally, we incorporate lexical and entity embeddings into the dialogue text in a uniform manner to meet the requirements of downstream dialogue generation tasks. By applying both fine-tuning and p-tuning to CMed-GPT, we lowered the PPL from 8.44 to 7.35. This study not only confirms the exceptional performance of the CMed-GPT model in generating Chinese biomedical text but also highlights the advantages of p-tuning over traditional fine-tuning with prefix prompts. Furthermore, we validate the significance of incorporating external information in medical dialogue generation, which enhances the quality of dialogue generation.

Morphology-Enhanced CAM-Guided SAM for weakly supervised Breast Lesion Segmentation

Breast cancer diagnosis challenges both patients and clinicians, with early detection being crucial for effective treatment. Ultrasound imaging plays a key role in this, but its utility is hampered by the need for precise lesion segmentation-a task that is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework: a morphology-enhanced, Class Activation Map (CAM)-guided model, which is optimized using a computer vision foundation model known as SAM. This innovative framework is specifically designed for weakly supervised lesion segmentation in early-stage breast ultrasound images. Our approach uniquely leverages image-level annotations, which removes the requirement for detailed pixel-level annotation. Initially, we perform a preliminary segmentation using breast lesion morphology knowledge. Following this, we accurately localize lesions by extracting semantic information through a CAM-based heatmap. These two elements are then fused together, serving as a prompt to guide the SAM in performing refined segmentation. Subsequently, post-processing techniques are employed to rectify topological errors made by the SAM. Our method not only simplifies the segmentation process but also attains accuracy comparable to supervised learning methods that rely on pixel-level annotation. Our framework achieves a Dice score of 74.39% on the test set, demonstrating compareable performance with supervised learning methods. Additionally, it outperforms a supervised learning model, in terms of the Hausdorff distance, scoring 24.27 compared to Deeplabv3+'s 32.22. These experimental results showcase its feasibility and superior performance in integrating weakly supervised learning with SAM. The code is made available at: https://github.com/YueXin18/MorSeg-CAM-SAM.

Evaluating the Efficacy of Supervised Learning vs Large Language Models for Identifying Cognitive Distortions and Suicidal Risks in Chinese Social Media

Large language models, particularly those akin to the rapidly progressing GPT series, are gaining traction for their expansive influence. While there is keen interest in their applicability within medical domains such as psychology, tangible explorations on real-world data remain scant. Concurrently, users on social media platforms are increasingly vocalizing personal sentiments; under specific thematic umbrellas, these sentiments often manifest as negative emotions, sometimes escalating to suicidal inclinations. Timely discernment of such cognitive distortions and suicidal risks is crucial to effectively intervene and potentially avert dire circumstances. Our study ventured into this realm by experimenting on two pivotal tasks: suicidal risk and cognitive distortion identification on Chinese social media platforms. Using supervised learning as a baseline, we examined and contrasted the efficacy of large language models via three distinct strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. Our findings revealed a discernible performance gap between the large language models and traditional supervised learning approaches, primarily attributed to the models' inability to fully grasp subtle categories. Notably, while GPT-4 outperforms its counterparts in multiple scenarios, GPT-3.5 shows significant enhancement in suicide risk classification after fine-tuning. To our knowledge, this investigation stands as the maiden attempt at gauging large language models on Chinese social media tasks. This study underscores the forward-looking and transformative implications of using large language models in the field of psychology. It lays the groundwork for future applications in psychological research and practice.