Arabic Mental Health Question Answering: A Multi-Task Approach with Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Arabic-speaking communities face persistent challenges in mental health support due to linguistic complexity, cultural nuances, and limited specialized resources.This study introduces AraHealthQA 2025, a multi-task framework for Arabic mental health question answering, tackling three subtasks: (i) question classification, (ii) answer strategy classification, and (iii) generative question answering using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline.For classification,finetuned AraBERTv2, MARBERTv2, and Arabic RoBERTa on multi-label mental health data.For generation, developing a culturallyaware RAG system that integrates semantic chunking, query enhancement, and hybrid retrieval.Dense retrieval via akhooli/Arabic-SBERT-100K, sparse retrieval via rank_bm25, and generation using Sakalti/Saka-14B finetuned with culturally aligned mental health terminology (e.g., respecting religious sensitivities in advice).The approach achieves weighted F1-scores of 0.742 (question classification) and 0.718 (answer classification), and a BERTScore F1 of 0.821 representing up to 15% improvement over retrieval-only baselines.These findings demonstrate the potential of culturally sensitive, Arabic-focused NLP systems to advance accessible mental health support.
Authors: AbdelAziz Amr, Mamdouh Koritam, Mohamed Youssef, Marwa Aldeeb, Ensaf H. Mohamed
Institution: Nile University
Language: English
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4416037774