CUNY at CLPsych 2026: A Pipeline Approach to Classification and Summarization of Mental Health Change
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
- Ensembling multiple LLMs improves self-state inference.
- Upstream predictions can serve as features for downstream tasks.
- Augmenting in-context examples boosts performance.
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
- Combine LLM outputs with majority voting.
- Use LLM-generated labels as features for classifiers.
- Enhance in-context learning with augmented examples.
Topics
- Mental Health Monitoring
- Social Media Analysis
- Large Language Models
- In-Context Learning
- Supervised Classification
- Ensemble AI
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.