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arxiv: 2605.27911 · v1 · pith:EJZF7JUOnew · submitted 2026-05-27 · 💻 cs.AI

SuiChat-CN: Benchmarking Contextual Suicide Risk Assessment in Chinese Group Chats

Pith reviewed 2026-06-29 12:57 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.AI
keywords suicide risk assessmentcontextual analysisChinese group chatsTelegram benchmarkmulti-party conversationslarge language modelsearly detectionannotation paradigm
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The pith

Contextual information from group chats is essential for reliable suicide risk assessment.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

This paper introduces SuiChat-CN, a benchmark dataset drawn from Chinese Telegram group chats to assess suicide risk. It argues that single-post methods used on platforms like Weibo fall short because group chats involve short, fragmented, multi-party exchanges with implicit cultural cues. Segments are built by pulling signal words and expanding context in both directions, then labeled via an expert-checked LLM process. Tests across pre-trained models and more than 40 large language models show clear gains from full context, while fine-tuning and partial-context trials expose limits on spotting risk early. The work targets a gap in real-time messaging environments where prevention matters most.

Core claim

The SuiChat-CN benchmark contains 13,312 contextual segments from 1,406 users covering 258,228 raw messages. Experiments with PLMs and more than 40 LLMs establish that contextual information is essential for reliable risk assessment, while fine-tuning and partial-context evaluation further reveal the challenges of early detection in multi-party conversations.

What carries the argument

The SuiChat-CN benchmark of contextual conversational segments, built through signal-word extraction and bidirectional context expansion followed by expert-validated LLM-assisted annotation of user risk levels.

If this is right

  • Contextual models outperform isolated-post approaches on risk assessment tasks.
  • Fine-tuning on the benchmark data yields measurable gains in model performance.
  • Partial context leaves early detection unreliable in multi-party group settings.
  • Instant-messaging platforms need context-aware methods distinct from post-based social media analysis.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The segment-construction and annotation method could transfer to suicide-risk tasks in other languages or messaging apps.
  • Privacy-preserving versions of the pipeline might support real-time monitoring tools if ethical safeguards are added.
  • Future training corpora for detection models should emphasize full conversational threads over standalone messages.

Load-bearing premise

The expert-validated, LLM-assisted annotation accurately identifies true user suicide risk levels from the constructed segments.

What would settle it

A head-to-head test in which non-contextual models match or exceed the accuracy of contextual models on the same SuiChat-CN segments would falsify the necessity of context.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.27911 by Chengze Du, Dingchang Wang, Fangyu Zheng, Xiangyu Wang, Yuhan Ye, Zhiwei Yu.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Fragments of two chat segments from a Chi [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p001_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Suicide risk classification taxonomy of the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p003_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Overview of the SuiChat-CN dataset construction pipeline. six fine-grained risk categories: no risk, depres￾sive emotion, suicidal ideation, suicidal behavior, suicide attempt, and suicide induction or verbal aggression. High-risk samples (ideation, behavior, and attempt) account for 47.16% of the dataset. Detailed statistics are shown in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p004_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Parameter sensitivity analysis of our proposed method. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Pairwise inter-model agreement (Cohen’s κ) among a representative subset of voter models used in the silver-annotation pipeline. perparameters, the signal-word framework, and the agreement structure of multi-model voting anno￾tation. Supplementary analyses are provided in Appendix F and Appendix J. Hyperparameter selection for Data Construc￾tion. We decouple context construction from for￾mal annotation and… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Per-class accuracy trajectories under partial context disclosure for eight representative models. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Chain-of-thought and few-shot learning prompt for signal word extraction. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Chain-of-thought prompt for LLM suicide risk evaluation. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p023_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Online Annotation Platform 24 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p024_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Consensus Review System 25 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p025_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Distribution of final silver labels across the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p026_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Per-model decomposition of the Nc = 7,148 consensus-labelled items. In-bar percentages give each model’s agreement rate conditional on a non-abstaining response; the green portion equals the absolute number of agreed items divided by Nc. 26 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p026_12.png] view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Accuracy (left) and Macro F1 (right) of the eight streaming baselines as a function of the disclosure ratio [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_13.png] view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Macro F1 (%) heatmap. Rows are ordered as [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_14.png] view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: Confusion matrix for suicide risk misclassifi [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_15.png] view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Per-class few-shot accuracy on the balanced validation set, split by jargon-dominant vs. non-jargon [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p028_16.png] view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17: (a) Per-class accuracy by seed-word dominance type; (b) class-stratified [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p028_17.png] view at source ↗
Figure 18
Figure 18. Figure 18: Pooled accuracy (%) by dominance type (rows) and gold label (columns). 28 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p028_18.png] view at source ↗
Figure 19
Figure 19. Figure 19: Summary across models: pooled accuracy, per-model [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p029_19.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Suicide is a critical global public health challenge, causing approximately 720,000 deaths each year and calling for timely, effective prevention strategies. Existing computational studies primarily focus on post-based social media platforms such as Twitter and Weibo, leaving instant messaging environments such as Telegram underexplored. Yet group chats pose distinct challenges: messages are short, fragmented, multi-party, and often rely on implicit or culturally specific expressions, making isolated post-level analysis insufficient. We introduce SuiChat-CN, a Chinese group-chat benchmark for contextual suicide risk assessment. We collect public Telegram group-chat data, construct coherent conversational segments through signal-word extraction and bidirectional context expansion, and annotate user risk levels with an expert-validated, LLM-assisted paradigm. SuiChat-CN contains 13,312 contextual segments from 1,406 users, covering 258,228 raw chat messages. Extensive experiments with PLMs and more than 40 LLMs demonstrate that contextual information is essential for reliable risk assessment, while fine-tuning and partial-context evaluation further reveal the challenges of early detection in multi-party conversations. Due to ethical and sensitivity concerns, the dataset is not publicly released but will be shared with accredited mental health and suicide-prevention research institutions upon reasonable request.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper introduces SuiChat-CN, a benchmark of 13,312 contextual segments drawn from 1,406 users and 258,228 raw Chinese Telegram group-chat messages. Segments are built by signal-word extraction followed by bidirectional context expansion; user risk levels are assigned via an expert-validated, LLM-assisted annotation pipeline. Experiments with PLMs and more than 40 LLMs are used to argue that full conversational context is essential for reliable suicide-risk assessment and that early detection in multi-party settings remains difficult.

Significance. If the segment-level risk labels prove reliable, the work supplies the first large-scale benchmark focused on implicit, multi-party, culturally specific expressions in instant-messaging environments rather than isolated social-media posts. The scale of the LLM evaluation and the emphasis on partial-context and fine-tuning ablations could usefully inform model development for early-intervention systems, while the decision to release the data only to accredited institutions is ethically appropriate.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract / Annotation] Abstract (and the Data Construction / Annotation sections): the central claim that 'contextual information is essential' rests entirely on the correctness of the 13,312 risk labels. The manuscript supplies no inter-annotator agreement statistic, no size or sampling method for the expert-reviewed subset, and no comparison against an independent gold-standard annotation. Without these quantities it is impossible to determine whether LLM-assisted labeling systematically misclassifies culturally implicit expressions, rendering all full-context vs. partial-context accuracy differences uninterpretable.
  2. [Experiments] Experiments section: performance differences between full-context and partial-context models are reported without error bars, statistical significance tests, or an ablation that isolates the effect of potential label noise. Because label quality is unquantified, these differences cannot be confidently attributed to the value of context rather than annotation artifacts.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract states the dataset 'will be shared with accredited mental health and suicide-prevention research institutions upon reasonable request' but provides no concrete access protocol or review criteria; this should be clarified for reproducibility.
  2. [Experiments] Table or figure captions that report model counts ('more than 40 LLMs') should list the exact models and versions evaluated.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive and detailed feedback. We address each major comment below and commit to revisions that directly respond to the concerns raised.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Abstract / Annotation] Abstract (and the Data Construction / Annotation sections): the central claim that 'contextual information is essential' rests entirely on the correctness of the 13,312 risk labels. The manuscript supplies no inter-annotator agreement statistic, no size or sampling method for the expert-reviewed subset, and no comparison against an independent gold-standard annotation. Without these quantities it is impossible to determine whether LLM-assisted labeling systematically misclassifies culturally implicit expressions, rendering all full-context vs. partial-context accuracy differences uninterpretable.

    Authors: We agree that the absence of reported inter-annotator agreement (IAA), expert-review subset size, sampling details, and gold-standard comparison limits the interpretability of the results. Although the manuscript describes an expert-validated, LLM-assisted pipeline, these quantitative validation metrics were not included. In the revised manuscript we will add: (1) the IAA statistic computed on the expert-reviewed portion, (2) the exact size and sampling procedure of that subset, and (3) any available comparison against an independent gold-standard annotation. These additions will allow readers to assess label reliability directly. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Experiments] Experiments section: performance differences between full-context and partial-context models are reported without error bars, statistical significance tests, or an ablation that isolates the effect of potential label noise. Because label quality is unquantified, these differences cannot be confidently attributed to the value of context rather than annotation artifacts.

    Authors: We concur that error bars, statistical significance testing, and an explicit analysis of label-noise effects are necessary to attribute performance gains to context rather than annotation artifacts. The current version reports point estimates only. In the revision we will: (1) recompute all reported metrics with error bars (via bootstrapping or multiple random seeds), (2) add paired statistical significance tests between full-context and partial-context conditions, and (3) include a sensitivity ablation that perturbs a controlled fraction of labels to quantify robustness to noise. These changes will strengthen the experimental claims. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: benchmark rests on independent data collection and external model evaluations

full rationale

The paper constructs SuiChat-CN via Telegram data collection, signal-word segment extraction with bidirectional expansion, and an expert-validated LLM-assisted annotation process yielding 13,312 segments. It then runs independent experiments comparing PLMs and >40 LLMs under full vs. partial context to measure the value of context and early-detection difficulty. No equations, fitted parameters renamed as predictions, self-citation chains, or ansatzes appear; the central claims derive directly from the new dataset and off-the-shelf model runs rather than reducing to the inputs by construction.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the validity of the data curation process and the assumption that textual risk signals can be reliably labeled.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Textual content in group chats can be used to assess suicide risk levels
    This underpins the annotation and evaluation process described in the abstract.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5759 in / 1324 out tokens · 56473 ms · 2026-06-29T12:57:10.890587+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

12 extracted references · 1 canonical work pages

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    InProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pages 75–84

    Machine classification and analysis of suicide- related communication on twitter. InProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pages 75–84. ACM. SP Devika, MR Pooja, MS Arpitha, and Ravi Vinayaku- mar. 2023. Bert-based approach for suicide and de- pression identification. InProceedings of 3rd Inter- national Conference on Advanc...

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    Kelly Posner, Gregory Brown, Barbara Stanley, Kseniya Yershova, Maria Oquendo, Glenn Currier, Glenn Melvin, Laurence Greenhill, Sa Shen, and J

    Detecting suicidality on twitter.Internet Inter- ventions, 2(2):183–188. Kelly Posner, Gregory Brown, Barbara Stanley, Kseniya Yershova, Maria Oquendo, Glenn Currier, Glenn Melvin, Laurence Greenhill, Sa Shen, and J. Mann

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    The American journal of psychiatry, 168:1266–77

    The columbia-suicide severity rating scale: Initial validity and internal consistency findings from three multisite studies with adolescents and adults. The American journal of psychiatry, 168:1266–77. Hongzhi Qi, Guanghui Fu, Jianqiang Li, Changwei Song, Wei Zhai, Dan Luo, Shuo Liu, Yijing Yu, Bingxiang Yang, and Qing Zhao. 2025. Supervised learning and ...

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    Ramit Sawhney, Harshit Joshi, Saumya Gandhi, and Rajiv Ratn Shah

    Depressionemo: A novel dataset for multil- abel classification of depression emotions.Journal of Affective Disorders, 366:445–458. Ramit Sawhney, Harshit Joshi, Saumya Gandhi, and Rajiv Ratn Shah. 2020. A time-aware transformer based model for suicide ideation detection on social media. InProceedings of the 25th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural ...

  5. [5]

    ൻԛğJSONൔ೘ჭቆb (Reasoning Steps:)

  6. [6]

    Analyze the conversation semantics: Determine whether it expresses suicidal or depressive emotions, focusing on both explicit and implicit expressions

  7. [7]

    Identify signal words: Extract explicit or implicit signal words related to suicide or depression and analyze their meanings

  8. [8]

    Determine the true intention: Identify the actual object or concept referenced by the explicit or implicit expressions

  9. [9]

    Infer the underlying motive: Describe the semantic connection between the true intention and the original suicide or depression- related signal words using a clear and concise explanation

  10. [10]

    the more I chat the more I want todie

    Output: Return a single triplet in JSON format. ഒဢЧൕ২ğ •છđൻԛğ<ൔ > •तđൻԛğ<đሱ೪ၩ๭ > •མႵದյඵ໡ীđൻԛğ<ൔđյඵ໡đሱ೪ၩ๭ > •Ϥс siđൻԛğ<đsiіղሱ೪ > •ದđൻԛğ<іղሱ೪ > (Few-shot Examples:) • Input: Who has potent potassium cyanide for sale, Output: <Suicide method, cyanide, Suicide means> • Input: What does jump into magma feel like, Output: <Suicide method, jump into magma, Suici...

  11. [11]

    Read the Chat Context: Carefully and thoroughly read all messages in the chat context provided below to understand the background, emotional changes, and topic development

  12. [12]

    UserID: Message Content

    Locate the Target User: In the conversation, find the target message that contains the <Signal Word> tag and identify the user who posted this message as the target user. ҄ᇧ 1໊ 1.ഈ༯໓ğᅚb 2.ğႵ <Signal Word>b Step 2: Risk Category Assessment Compare the target user’s statements with the following risk categories and select the most appropriate risk category ...