Overview of the PsyDefDetect Shared Task at BioNLP 2026: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2605.24907 (cs)
[Submitted on 24 May 2026]
Title:Overview of the PsyDefDetect Shared Task at BioNLP 2026: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations
Authors:Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Yining Hua, Rena Gao, Kailai Yang, Ling Chen, Wei Wang, Shaoxiong Ji, John Torous, Sophia Ananiadou
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Abstract:We present an overview of PsyDefDetect, the shared task on detecting levels of psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues, co-located with BioNLP@ACL 2026. Grounded in the clinically validated Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework, the task asks systems to classify a target seeker utterance, given its preceding dialogue context, into one of nine categories: seven hierarchical DMRS levels plus two auxiliary labels. Participants worked on PsyDefConv, a newly released corpus of 200 dialogues and 2336 help-seeker utterances annotated under DMRS with substantial inter-annotator agreement. The task attracted 172 participants on CodaBench who produced 563 submissions, with 21 teams officially registering their results for the final ranking. The best system achieved a macro F1-score of 0.420, surpassing the strongest fine-tuned baseline reported in the dataset paper by a notable margin, yet leaving clear headroom. Our analysis highlights (i) a persistent tendency to over-predict the majority High-Adaptive class, (ii) a widening gap between accuracy and macro-F1 that reveals class-imbalance sensitivity, and (iii) the value of theory-aware and LLM-based approaches for fine-grained defensive-function classification. We release all task materials and invite the community to continue work on this novel intersection of clinical psychology and NLP.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.24907 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.24907v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.24907
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Overview of the PsyDefDetect Shared Task at BioNLP 2026: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations, by Hongbin Na and 10 other authors
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