Introducing ELLIPS: An Ethics-Centered Approach to Research on LLM-Based Inference of Psychiatric Conditions
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: As mental health care systems worldwide struggle to meet demand, there is increasing focus on using language models (LM) to infer neuropsychiatric conditions or psychopathological traits from language production. Yet, so far, this research has only delivered solutions with limited clinical applicability, due to insufficient consideration of ethical questions crucial to ensuring the synergy between possible applications and model design. To accelerate progress towards clinically applicable models, our paper charts the ethical landscape of research on language-based inference of psychopathology and provides a practical tool for researchers to navigate it. We identify seven core ethical principles that should guide model development and deployment in this domain, translate them into ELLIPS, an ethical toolkit operationalizing these principles into questions that can guide researchers' choices with respect to data selection, architectures, evaluation, and model deployment, and provide a case study exemplifying its use. With this, we aim to facilitate the emergence of model technology with concrete potential for real-world applicability.
Authors: Roberta Rocca, Giada Pistilli, Kritika Maheshwari, Riccardo Fusaroli
Institutions: Aarhus University, Hugging Face, Delft University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404518532