Language-model ratings of depression reflect the rater more than the patient
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.08501 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Oct 2026]
Title:Language-model ratings of depression reflect the rater more than the patient
Authors:Baihan Lin
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Abstract:Depression has no diagnostic blood test. Language models promise tireless, consistent assessment, but can accurate raters disagree about individuals? We pre-registered 880 language-model raters, crossing 11 open models with prompting and scoring choices, and applied them to 189 interviews against the eight-item Patient Health Questionnaire. Model choice explained 30.0% of summed-symptom score variance, stable participant differences 10.5%. Two randomly drawn raters with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) >= 0.70 disagreed on screening decisions for 40% of participants, on average. Average over-rating governed how many were flagged, yet equal-capacity raters chose differently for about one participant in five. A locked analysis of 86 new interviews reproduced the main pre-registered findings. Exploratory recalibration with 40 labelled participants raised accuracy from about 60% to 75% and halved disagreement, leaving one participant in five decided differently. Calibration repaired much of the rater dependence without securing agreement about individuals.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.08501 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.08501v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08501
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Language-model ratings of depression reflect the rater more than the patient, by Baihan Lin
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