Exploring the Ethical Concerns in User Reviews of Mental Health Apps using Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rahman, Mohammad Masudur, Chaudhry, Beenish Moalla
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Rahman, Mohammad Masudur
Chaudhry, Beenish Moalla
author_facet Rahman, Mohammad Masudur
Chaudhry, Beenish Moalla
contents The rapid growth of AI-driven mental health mobile apps has raised concerns about their ethical considerations and user trust. This study proposed a natural language processing (NLP)-based framework to evaluate ethical aspects from user-generated reviews from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. After gathering and cleaning the data, topic modeling was applied to identify latent themes in the context of ethics using topic words and then map them to well-recognized existing ethical principles described in different ethical frameworks; in addition to that, a bottom-up approach is applied to find any new and emergent ethics from the reviews using a transformer-based zero-shot classification model. Sentiment analysis was then used to capture how users feel about each ethical aspect. The obtained results reveal that well-known ethical considerations are not enough for the modern AI-based technologies and are missing emerging ethical challenges, showing how these apps either uphold or overlook key moral values. This work contributes to developing an ongoing evaluation system that can enhance the fairness, transparency, and trustworthiness of AI-powered mental health chatbots.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Ethical Concerns in User Reviews of Mental Health Apps using Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis
Rahman, Mohammad Masudur
Chaudhry, Beenish Moalla
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
The rapid growth of AI-driven mental health mobile apps has raised concerns about their ethical considerations and user trust. This study proposed a natural language processing (NLP)-based framework to evaluate ethical aspects from user-generated reviews from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. After gathering and cleaning the data, topic modeling was applied to identify latent themes in the context of ethics using topic words and then map them to well-recognized existing ethical principles described in different ethical frameworks; in addition to that, a bottom-up approach is applied to find any new and emergent ethics from the reviews using a transformer-based zero-shot classification model. Sentiment analysis was then used to capture how users feel about each ethical aspect. The obtained results reveal that well-known ethical considerations are not enough for the modern AI-based technologies and are missing emerging ethical challenges, showing how these apps either uphold or overlook key moral values. This work contributes to developing an ongoing evaluation system that can enhance the fairness, transparency, and trustworthiness of AI-powered mental health chatbots.
title Exploring the Ethical Concerns in User Reviews of Mental Health Apps using Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18454