# DreamerNLplus: Interpretable Modeling of Mental Health Dynamics from Social Media Timelines using Hybrid Rule-Based and RAG Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23052/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 3 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Medical and biomedical RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/medical-and-biomedical-rag/)

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

- [A Systematic Evaluation of LLM Strategies for Mental Health Text Analysis: Fine-tuning vs. Prompt Engineering vs. RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24307/) (2025)
- [MaLei at MultiClinSUM: Summarisation of Clinical Documents using Perspective-Aware Iterative Self-Prompting with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07622/) (2025)
- [Dutch Metaphor Extraction from Cancer Patients' Interviews and Forum Data using LLMs and Human in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06427/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present DreamerNLplus, a hybrid framework for modeling mental health dynamics from social media timelines in the CLPsych 2026 shared task. Our system addresses three tasks: psychological state modeling, temporal change detection, and sequence-level summarization. For Task 1, we combine LLM-based data augmentation, DeBERTa classification, and Random Forest regression for structured state prediction. For Task 2, we use few-shot prompting with a locally deployed Llama 3.1 model to detect Switch and Escalation events using short-term temporal context. For Task 3.1, we explore both a deterministic rule-based summarization pipeline and a few-shot LLM-based approach, ranking 2nd officially. Our RAG-based method achieves strong performance in Task 3.2, ranking 1st for Improvement and 3rd for Deterioration, demonstrating its ability to capture recurrent psychological change patterns across timelines. Our analysis reveals key challenges, including the mismatch between classification and regression performance, the difficulty of modeling temporal transitions, and the disagreement between semantic and similarity-based evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the complexity of modeling mental health dynamics and motivate future work on unified evaluation frameworks. We share our code and prompts at https://github.com/4dpicture/CLPsych2026