Detecting Suicidal Ideation on Social Media Using Large Language Models with Zero-Shot Prompting

Golnaz Nikmehr, Aritz Bilbao-Jayo, Aron Henriksson, Aitor Almeida

Abstract: Detecting suicidal ideation in social media posts using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning has become an essential approach for early intervention and providing support to at-risk individuals. The role of data is critical in this process, as the accuracy of NLP models largely depends on the quality and quantity of labeled data available for training. Traditional methods, such as keyword-based approaches and models reliant on manually annotated datasets, face limitations due to the complex and time-consuming nature of data labeling. This shortage of high-quality labeled data creates a significant bottleneck, limiting model fine-tuning. With the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various NLP applications, we utilize their strengths to classify posts expressing suicidal ideation. Specifically, we apply zero-shot prompting with LLMs, enabling effective classification even in data-scarce environments without needing extensive fine-tuning, thus reducing

External IDs:dblp:conf/ict4ageingwell/NikmehrBHA25