Just a Scratch: Enhancing LLM Capabilities for Self-harm Detection through Intent Differentiation and Emoji Interpretation

TL;DR

This paper improves large language models' ability to detect self-harm expressions on social media by differentiating intent and interpreting emojis, using a new dataset and curated emoji set for better context understanding.

Contribution

It introduces the CESM-100 emoji set and the SHINES dataset, and proposes a unified framework for enhanced self-harm detection and explainability in LLMs.

Findings

Enhanced detection accuracy across multiple LLMs.

Improved explainability of self-harm predictions.

Effective handling of implicit and ambiguous cues.

Abstract

Self-harm detection on social media is critical for early intervention and mental health support, yet remains challenging due to the subtle, context-dependent nature of such expressions. Identifying self-harm intent aids suicide prevention by enabling timely responses, but current large language models (LLMs) struggle to interpret implicit cues in casual language and emojis. This work enhances LLMs' comprehension of self-harm by distinguishing intent through nuanced language-emoji interplay. We present the Centennial Emoji Sensitivity Matrix (CESM-100), a curated set of 100 emojis with contextual self-harm interpretations and the Self-Harm Identification aNd intent Extraction with Supportive emoji sensitivity (SHINES) dataset, offering detailed annotations for self-harm labels, casual mentions (CMs), and serious intents (SIs). Our unified framework: a) enriches inputs using CESM-100; b) fine-tunes LLMs for multi-task learning: self-harm detection (primary) and CM/SI span detection (auxiliary); c) generates explainable rationales for self-harm predictions. We evaluate the framework on three state-of-the-art LLMs-Llama 3, Mental-Alpaca, and MentalLlama, across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned scenarios. By coupling intent differentiation with contextual cues, our approach commendably enhances LLM performance in both detection and explanation tasks, effectively addressing the inherent ambiguity in self-harm signals. The SHINES dataset, CESM-100 and codebase are publicly available at: https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#SHINES .