PsyDefDetect invites researchers to tackle a novel challenge at the intersection of Clinical Psychology and Natural Language Processing: detecting and classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues.
Grounded in the clinically validated Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework, this shared task aims to advance the understanding of unconscious defensive functioning in text.
News
- 2025-12-15 – PsyDefDetect is officially announced as a shared task at the BioNLP@ACL 2026.
Contact
Please stay up to date by joining our Discord Server and Mailing List. If you have any questions for the organizers, please email us at psydefdetect@googlegroups.com.
Organizers
- Hongbin Na, University of Technology Sydney
- Zimu Wang, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
- Zhaoming Chen, University of Utah
- Yining Hua, Harvard University
- Rena Gao, The University of Melbourne
- Kailai Yang, The University of Manchester
- Ling Chen, University of Technology Sydney
- Wei Wang, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
- Shaoxiong Ji, ELLIS Institute Finland & University of Turku
- John Torous, Harvard University
- Sophia Ananiadou, The University of Manchester
Acknowledgments
We thank Label Studio for providing Academic Program access to its data labeling platform, which supported our annotation work.
Fun Facts
This psychological defenses dataset was annotated by the author while attending ACL 2025 in Vienna, with a brief visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum.