Tailoring Adaptive-Zero-Shot Retrieval and Probabilistic Modelling for Psychometric Data
Federico Ravenda, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Noriko Kando, Antonietta Mira, Andrea Raballo, Fábio Crestani · 2025
Likert scales are widely used tools in psychology, employed to quantify individuals' feelings, attitudes, and perceptions through structured questionnaires. However, administering these questionnaires can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, limiting their practicality in fast-paced mental health screening scenarios. This study presents a novel approach to predict Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) scores using social media posts. Our method introduces two key innovations: an adaptive strategy for identifying relevant social media content according to each survey question (aka item) and a probabilistic extension of BERT to predict item-specific scores. The results show that our implemented approach is particularly accurate in correctly predicting responses to BDI-II questionnaire items compared to the considered benchmarks1.