# A Baseline for Self-state Identification and Classification in Mental Health Data: CLPsych 2025 Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14066/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Identifying Moments of Change from Longitudinal User Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05593/) (2022)

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

- [MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03340/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a baseline for the CLPsych 2025 A.1 task: classifying self-states in mental health data taken from Reddit. We use few-shot learning with a 4-bit quantized Gemma 2 9B model and a data preprocessing step which first identifies relevant sentences indicating self-state evidence, and then performs a binary classification to determine whether the sentence is evidence of an adaptive or maladaptive self-state. This system outperforms our other method which relies on an LLM to highlight spans of variable length independently. We attribute the performance of our model to the benefits of this sentence chunking step for two reasons: partitioning posts into sentences 1) broadly matches the granularity at which self-states were human-annotated and 2) simplifies the task for our language model to a binary classification problem. Our system places third out of fourteen systems submitted for Task A.1, achieving a test-time recall of 0.579.