RedditESS: A Mental Health Social Support Interaction Dataset -- Understanding Effective Social Support to Refine AI-Driven Support Tools

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alghamdi, Zeyad, Kumarage, Tharindu, Agrawal, Garima, Karami, Mansooreh, Almuteb, Ibrahim, Liu, Huan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Alghamdi, Zeyad
Kumarage, Tharindu
Agrawal, Garima
Karami, Mansooreh
Almuteb, Ibrahim
Liu, Huan
author_facet Alghamdi, Zeyad
Kumarage, Tharindu
Agrawal, Garima
Karami, Mansooreh
Almuteb, Ibrahim
Liu, Huan
contents Effective mental health support is crucial for alleviating psychological distress. While large language model (LLM)-based assistants have shown promise in mental health interventions, existing research often defines "effective" support primarily in terms of empathetic acknowledgments, overlooking other essential dimensions such as informational guidance, community validation, and tangible coping strategies. To address this limitation and better understand what constitutes effective support, we introduce RedditESS, a novel real-world dataset derived from Reddit posts, including supportive comments and original posters' follow-up responses. Grounded in established social science theories, we develop an ensemble labeling mechanism to annotate supportive comments as effective or not and perform qualitative assessments to ensure the reliability of the annotations. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical utility of RedditESS by using it to guide LLM alignment toward generating more context-sensitive and genuinely helpful supportive responses. By broadening the understanding of effective support, our study paves the way for advanced AI-driven mental health interventions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RedditESS: A Mental Health Social Support Interaction Dataset -- Understanding Effective Social Support to Refine AI-Driven Support Tools
Alghamdi, Zeyad
Kumarage, Tharindu
Agrawal, Garima
Karami, Mansooreh
Almuteb, Ibrahim
Liu, Huan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Effective mental health support is crucial for alleviating psychological distress. While large language model (LLM)-based assistants have shown promise in mental health interventions, existing research often defines "effective" support primarily in terms of empathetic acknowledgments, overlooking other essential dimensions such as informational guidance, community validation, and tangible coping strategies. To address this limitation and better understand what constitutes effective support, we introduce RedditESS, a novel real-world dataset derived from Reddit posts, including supportive comments and original posters' follow-up responses. Grounded in established social science theories, we develop an ensemble labeling mechanism to annotate supportive comments as effective or not and perform qualitative assessments to ensure the reliability of the annotations. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical utility of RedditESS by using it to guide LLM alignment toward generating more context-sensitive and genuinely helpful supportive responses. By broadening the understanding of effective support, our study paves the way for advanced AI-driven mental health interventions.
title RedditESS: A Mental Health Social Support Interaction Dataset -- Understanding Effective Social Support to Refine AI-Driven Support Tools
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21888