# MTLHealth: A Deep Learning System for Detecting Disturbing Content in Student Essays

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04290 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04290/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01368/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11504/) (2019)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [Depression and Self-Harm Risk Assessment in Online Forums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01848/) (2017)
- [A Joint Many-Task Model: Growing a Neural Network for Multiple NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01587/) (2016)
- [Neural network approach to classifying alarming student responses to online assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08899/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Essay submissions to standardized tests like the ACT occasionally include references to bullying, self-harm, violence, and other forms of disturbing content. Graders must take great care to identify cases like these and decide whether to alert authorities on behalf of students who may be in danger. There is a growing need for robust computer systems to support human decision-makers by automatically flagging potential instances of disturbing content. This paper describes MTLHealth, a disturbing content detection pipeline built around recent advances from computational linguistics, particularly pre-trained language model Transformer networks.