DepreSym: A Depression Symptom Annotated Corpus and the Role of LLMs as
  Assessors of Psychological Markers
Anxo Pérez Marcos Fernández-Pichel Javier Parapar David E. Losada
Computational methods for depression detection aim to mine traces of
depression from online publications posted by Internet users. However,
solutions trained on existing collections exhibit limited generalisation and
interpretability. To tackle these issues, recent studies have shown that
identifying depressive symptoms can lead to more robust models. The eRisk
initiative fosters research on this area and has recently proposed a new
ranking task focused on developing search methods to find sentences related to
depressive symptoms. This search challenge relies on the symptoms specified by
the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), a questionnaire widely used in
clinical practice. Based on the participant systems' results, we present the
DepreSym dataset, consisting of 21580 sentences annotated according to their
relevance to the 21 BDI-II symptoms. The labelled sentences come from a pool of
diverse ranking methods, and the final dataset serves as a valuable resource
for advancing the development of models that incorporate depressive markers
such as clinical symptoms. Due to the complex nature of this relevance
annotation, we designed a robust assessment methodology carried out by three
expert assessors (including an expert psychologist). Additionally, we explore
here the feasibility of employing recent Large Language Models (ChatGPT and
GPT4) as potential assessors in this complex task. We undertake a comprehensive
examination of their performance, determine their main limitations and analyze
their role as a complement or replacement for human annotators.