CUNY at CLPsych 2026: A Pipeline Approach to Classification and Summarization of Mental Health Change

· Source: Paper Index on ACL Anthology · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Data Science & Analytics, Mental Health & Psychological Support · Depth: Expert, medium

Summary

CUNY's submission to the CLPsych 2026 Shared Task details a pipeline approach for classifying and summarizing mental health changes from social media timelines. For inferring dominant self-states in posts (Tasks 1.1 and 1.2), the system ensembles in-context learning from three open-weight large language models via majority voting. To predict moments of change within a timeline (Task 2), supervised classifiers are trained using features derived from Task 1.1 predictions. For summarizing mood dynamics and their progression over time (Task 3.1), the approach augments in-context example labels from upstream systems (Tasks 1.1, 1.2, and 2), which enhanced performance compared to zero-shot and unaugmented in-context learning baselines. The submission achieved notable rankings: first on Task 1.1, fourth on Task 1.2, fourth on Task 2, and third on Task 3.1.

Key takeaway

For NLP Engineers developing systems to monitor mental health changes from social media, consider adopting a multi-stage pipeline. You should integrate ensembled open-weight LLMs for initial self-state classification, then use these outputs as features for supervised classifiers to detect change points. Augmenting in-context learning with upstream system predictions can significantly improve summarization of mood dynamics, offering a robust framework for complex timeline analysis.

Key insights

The pipeline approach combining LLM ensembling and supervised classification effectively characterizes mental health changes from social media.

Principles

Method

A pipeline infers self-states via LLM ensemble majority voting, predicts change with supervised classifiers on derived features, and summarizes mood dynamics by augmenting in-context labels from upstream outputs.

In practice

Topics

Best for: AI Scientist, NLP Engineer, Research Scientist

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Paper Index on ACL Anthology.