# CARMA: Comprehensive Automatically-annotated Reddit Mental Health Dataset for Arabic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03102/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2025.

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

- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Muppet: Massive Multi-task Representations with Pre-Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11038/) (2021)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [Depression and Self-Harm Risk Assessment in Online Forums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01848/) (2017)
- [SMHD: A Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05258/) (2018)
- [Enhancing Semantic Similarity Understanding in Arabic NLP with Nested Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21139/) (2024)
- [MentalQA: An Annotated Arabic Corpus for Questions and Answers of Mental Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12619/) (2024)
- [AraHealthQA 2025: The First Shared Task on Arabic Health Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20047/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MindSET: Advancing Mental Health Benchmarking through Large-Scale Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20672/) (2025)
- [Style Transfer as Bias Mitigation: Diffusion Models for Synthetic Mental Health Text for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14124/) (2026)
- [Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10063/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mental health disorders affect millions worldwide, yet early detection remains a major challenge, particularly for Arabic-speaking populations where resources are limited and mental health discourse is often discouraged due to cultural stigma. While substantial research has focused on English-language mental health detection, Arabic remains significantly underexplored, partly due to the scarcity of annotated datasets. We present CARMA, the first automatically annotated large-scale dataset of Arabic Reddit posts. The dataset encompasses six mental health conditions, such as Anxiety, Autism, and Depression, and a control group. CARMA surpasses existing resources in both scale and diversity. We conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses of lexical and semantic differences between users, providing insights into the linguistic markers of specific mental health conditions. To demonstrate the dataset's potential for further mental health analysis, we perform classification experiments using a range of models, from shallow classifiers to large language models. Our results highlight the promise of advancing mental health detection in underrepresented languages such as Arabic.