# Lexicography Saves Lives (LSL): Automatically Translating Suicide-Related Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Suicidal Ideation Detection: A Review of Machine Learning Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12611/) (2019)
- [Suicidal Ideation and Mental Disorder Detection with Attentive Relation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07601/) (2020)
- [Latent Suicide Risk Detection on Microblog via Suicide-Oriented Word Embeddings and Layered Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12038/) (2019)
- [Domain-Specific Text Generation for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05909/) (2022)
- [Detecting Suicidal Ideation in Chinese Microblogs with Psychological Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.0778/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Survey on Multilingual Mental Disorders Detection from Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15556/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a marked increase in research that aims to identify or predict risk, intention or ideation of suicide. The majority of new tasks, datasets, language models and other resources focus on English and on suicide in the context of Western culture. However, suicide is global issue and reducing suicide rate by 2030 is one of the key goals of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Previous work has used English dictionaries related to suicide to translate into different target languages due to lack of other available resources. Naturally, this leads to a variety of ethical tensions (e.g.: linguistic misrepresentation), where discourse around suicide is not present in a particular culture or country. In this work, we introduce the 'Lexicography Saves Lives Project' to address this issue and make three distinct contributions. First, we outline ethical consideration and provide overview guidelines to mitigate harm in developing suicide-related resources. Next, we translate an existing dictionary related to suicidal ideation into 200 different languages and conduct human evaluations on a subset of translated dictionaries. Finally, we introduce a public website to make our resources available and enable community participation.