TalkDep: Clinically Grounded LLM Personas for Conversation-Centric Depression Screening

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Xi, Perez, Anxo, Parapar, Javier, Crestani, Fabio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wang, Xi
Perez, Anxo
Parapar, Javier
Crestani, Fabio
author_facet Wang, Xi
Perez, Anxo
Parapar, Javier
Crestani, Fabio
contents The increasing demand for mental health services has outpaced the availability of real training data to develop clinical professionals, leading to limited support for the diagnosis of depression. This shortage has motivated the development of simulated or virtual patients to assist in training and evaluation, but existing approaches often fail to generate clinically valid, natural, and diverse symptom presentations. In this work, we embrace the recent advanced language models as the backbone and propose a novel clinician-in-the-loop patient simulation pipeline, TalkDep, with access to diversified patient profiles to develop simulated patients. By conditioning the model on psychiatric diagnostic criteria, symptom severity scales, and contextual factors, our goal is to create authentic patient responses that can better support diagnostic model training and evaluation. We verify the reliability of these simulated patients with thorough assessments conducted by clinical professionals. The availability of validated simulated patients offers a scalable and adaptable resource for improving the robustness and generalisability of automatic depression diagnosis systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TalkDep: Clinically Grounded LLM Personas for Conversation-Centric Depression Screening
Wang, Xi
Perez, Anxo
Parapar, Javier
Crestani, Fabio
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The increasing demand for mental health services has outpaced the availability of real training data to develop clinical professionals, leading to limited support for the diagnosis of depression. This shortage has motivated the development of simulated or virtual patients to assist in training and evaluation, but existing approaches often fail to generate clinically valid, natural, and diverse symptom presentations. In this work, we embrace the recent advanced language models as the backbone and propose a novel clinician-in-the-loop patient simulation pipeline, TalkDep, with access to diversified patient profiles to develop simulated patients. By conditioning the model on psychiatric diagnostic criteria, symptom severity scales, and contextual factors, our goal is to create authentic patient responses that can better support diagnostic model training and evaluation. We verify the reliability of these simulated patients with thorough assessments conducted by clinical professionals. The availability of validated simulated patients offers a scalable and adaptable resource for improving the robustness and generalisability of automatic depression diagnosis systems.
title TalkDep: Clinically Grounded LLM Personas for Conversation-Centric Depression Screening
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04248