From "Help" to Helpful: A Hierarchical Assessment of LLMs in Mental e-Health Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Steigerwald, Philipp, Albrecht, Jens
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Steigerwald, Philipp
Albrecht, Jens
author_facet Steigerwald, Philipp
Albrecht, Jens
contents Psychosocial online counselling frequently encounters generic subject lines that impede efficient case prioritisation. This study evaluates eleven large language models generating six-word subject lines for German counselling emails through hierarchical assessment - first categorising outputs, then ranking within categories to enable manageable evaluation. Nine assessors (counselling professionals and AI systems) enable analysis via Krippendorff's $α$, Spearman's $ρ$, Pearson's $r$ and Kendall's $τ$. Results reveal performance trade-offs between proprietary services and privacy-preserving open-source alternatives, with German fine-tuning consistently improving performance. The study addresses critical ethical considerations for mental health AI deployment including privacy, bias and accountability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18443
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From "Help" to Helpful: A Hierarchical Assessment of LLMs in Mental e-Health Applications
Steigerwald, Philipp
Albrecht, Jens
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Psychosocial online counselling frequently encounters generic subject lines that impede efficient case prioritisation. This study evaluates eleven large language models generating six-word subject lines for German counselling emails through hierarchical assessment - first categorising outputs, then ranking within categories to enable manageable evaluation. Nine assessors (counselling professionals and AI systems) enable analysis via Krippendorff's $α$, Spearman's $ρ$, Pearson's $r$ and Kendall's $τ$. Results reveal performance trade-offs between proprietary services and privacy-preserving open-source alternatives, with German fine-tuning consistently improving performance. The study addresses critical ethical considerations for mental health AI deployment including privacy, bias and accountability.
title From "Help" to Helpful: A Hierarchical Assessment of LLMs in Mental e-Health Applications
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18443