Divergence from clinical definitions
How do mental health terms diverge from their psychiatric definitions as they enter everyday discourse?
RESEARCH
Research questions and objectives
Research questions
Variation across groups
How does perception and usage of mental-health terminology vary across different groups (e.g., laypeople, academic psychologists, people with lived experience)?
Interpretation by language models
To what extent can LLMs distinguish between clinical and colloquial uses of mental-health terminology and accurately infer users’ intent to avoid safety-relevant misinterpretations?
Objectives
MindShift benchmark
Create a multilingual, human-annotated benchmark capturing semantic proximity and affective dimensions across clinical and everyday contexts.
Human perception
Characterize how people interpret the same terms differently, including perceived severity, stigma, misleading uses and distress signals.
Computational evaluation
Evaluate how language technologies represent denotational and connotational variation, using human judgments as reference.
Guardrails
Translate findings into practical evaluation tools and design guidance for safer, context-sensitive human–AI interaction.