Prompt Engineering for Capturing Dynamic Mental Health Self States from Social Media Posts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the advent of modern Computational Linguistic techniques and the growing societal mental health crisis, we contribute to the field of Clinical Psychology by participating in the CLPsych 2025 shared task. This paper describes the methods and results obtained by the uOttawa team’s submission (which included a researcher from the National Institutes of Health in the USA, in addition to three researchers from the University of Ottawa, Canada). The task consists of four subtasks focused on modeling longitudinal changes in social media users’ mental states and generating accurate summaries of these dynamic self-states. Through prompt engineering of a modern large language model (Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct), the uOttawa team placed first, sixth, fifth, and second, respectively, for each subtask, amongst the other submissions. This work demonstrates the capacity of modern large language models to recognize nuances in the analysis of mental states and to generate summaries through carefully crafted prompting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".