CLPsych 2018 - Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

Past workshops have been held in conjunction with the 2014 and 2017 ACL Conferences and the 2015 and 2016 Conferences of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT). Previously published papers of the workshop have proposed methods for aiding the diagnosis of dementia, quantifying repetitive behavior in conversations of autistic children, and detecting a number of mental health disorders in social media, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia. The 2015, 2016, and 2017 workshops additionally hosted Shared Tasks. CLPsych 2018 aims to continue the discussion and build the momentum towards releasing tools and data that can be used by mental and neurological healthcare professionals.
Goals and Topics of Interest
The continuing goal of the CLPsych workshop is to bring together computational linguistics researchers with clinicians to talk about the ways that language technology can be used to improve mental and neurological health.
Instead of the traditional presentation-plus-questions format, each paper presented at the workshop will also have a clinically-oriented discussant, who will read the paper thoroughly in advance, present commentary, and help guide the discussion. This means that papers submitted to this workshop must be written with that cross-disciplinary conversation in mind, not solely for a technical audience.
Our goals are to:
increase language technologists’ understanding of what people working in the field of mental and neurological health — clinicians, psychologists, and social workers — do, and what their real needs are;
increase clinicians’ understanding of what’s possible in language technology and what it might have to offer;
formulate targets and priorities for near-term improvement of the practical state of the art;
facilitate the creation and development of high-value NLP tools that can be deployed in the clinical community.
This year we are particularly interested in papers that will contribute to a conversation about whether NLP solutions are ready to deploy in the clinical world, and what that deployment could look like. We are also interested in submissions that bear on issues like the following, relative to psychological conditions and neurological disorders:
What features of language or speech could play a prominent role in diagnosis, monitoring, and other elements of clinical practice?
What algorithms and forms of modeling are applicable?
What kinds of data exists or could be obtained?
What tools or resources does this research make available?
What practical or ethical issues require attention?
We aim to emerge from the workshop discussions with a further strategy for progress in this field, informed by both the NLP and clinical psychologist participants. This could include, for example, identifying additional topics, tasks, and data; formulating a plan for creating and sharing IRB application templates for NLP work in psychology; or identifying the top-level requirements for an NLP toolkit specifically devoted to practical issues in clinical psychology.