--- title: "Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages — Kandala 2025" description: "The paper examines the gap between how patients in India describe psychological distress in their native languages… 3 references, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Ananth Kandala", "Ratna Kandala", "Akshata Kishore Moharir", "Niva Manchanda", "Sunaina Singh Rathod"] year: 2025 venue: "NLP-AI4Health" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlpai4health-main.3/" doi: "10.18653/v1/2025.nlpai4health-main.3" arxiv: "2510.05387" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kandala-2025-cross-lingual-mental-health-ontologies/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kandala-2025-cross-lingual-mental-health-ontologies/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/3/) / Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation # Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation **Authors:** Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda and Sunaina Singh Rathod · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** NLP-AI4Health · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlpai4health-main.3/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlpai4health-main.3.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2025.nlpai4health-main.3](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.nlpai4health-main.3) · [arXiv 2510.05387](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05387) **Citations:** 1 in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper examines the gap between how patients in India describe psychological distress in their native languages and how it is captured by the Western clinical classifications DSM-5 and ICD-11. NLP tools trained predominantly on English-language data barely recognize idioms (for example, Hindi man ka bhoj), bodily metaphors, and code-mixing with English. The authors propose the conceptual framework CL-PDE (Cross-Lingual Graphs of Patient Distress Expressions). First, a corpus of patient narratives is collected from consultations, helplines, forums, and social media and annotated with linguistic and cultural labels. Next, a heterogeneous graph is built in which expressions in different languages are linked to one another and to clinical concept nodes. Candidate links are proposed by multilingual encoders and LLMs, and experts verify them in a human-in-the-loop cycle. A separate explanation layer makes each mapping understandable to the clinician. This is a position paper: it contains no empirical results, only an evaluation plan. Its value lies in a methodological template for a culturally sensitive cross-lingual ontology for low-resource languages. ## Key points - Type of paper: a framework description without experiments. Language examples are drawn from Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi, as well as from code-mixed Hindi-English utterances. Context: 22 officially recognized (scheduled) languages with more than 1.17 billion speakers, and 1369 languages and dialects according to the 2011 census. - The graph is built in four steps: 1. Expression nodes are extracted using NER and phrase mining. 2. Intra-lingual and cross-lingual edges are determined using mBERT / XLM-R embeddings and cosine similarity. 3. An LLM proposes links to ICD-11, DSM-5, or cultural categories, adding a rationale and an uncertainty estimate. 4. Edges are enriched with metadata: relation type, provenance, validator confidence. - Data are planned to come from two sources. Primary: anonymized transcripts from mental health organizations in five states. Secondary: forums, support groups, and social media (subject to ethical approval). - Explanations are generated in five ways: annotation-based, via attention visualization, rule-based, via similar examples, and contrastively. The HITL cycle includes active learning, batch validation, feedback for updating thresholds, and resolution of disagreements between annotators. - Evaluation covers five dimensions: intrinsic graph metrics, downstream tasks, explainability, HITL efficiency, and cultural validity. The target inter-annotator agreement is κ > 0.7. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* 💡 Concepts (1): [🕸️ Ontology engineering](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/ontology-engineering/) · 25 works 📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 3,111 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 2,951 works 🧭 Topics (3): [🌍 Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/) · 388 works · [🕸️ Knowledge graphs & ontologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/knowledge-graphs/) · 87 works · [🔬 Interpretability](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/interpretability/) · 47 works ## Cite Cite as: Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda and Sunaina Singh Rathod. 2025. Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation. NLP-AI4Health. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{kandala2025cross, title = {{Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation}}, author = {Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda and Sunaina Singh Rathod}, booktitle = {NLP-AI4Health}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.nlpai4health-main.3}, eprint = {2510.05387}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.nlpai4health-main.3} } ``` - [← previous Creation of a Numerical Scoring System to Objectively Measure and Compare the Level of Rhetoric in Arabic Texts: A Feasibility Study, and A Working Prototype](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marathe-2025-creation-numerical-scoring-system-objectively/) - [next → Cross-Lingual SynthDocs: A Large-Scale Synthetic Corpus for Any to Arabic OCR and Document Understanding](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/al-homoud-2025-cross-lingual-synthdocs-large-scale/) - [↑ back to papers of 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/3/) ## References 3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US). 2014. Improving Cultural Competence. Number 59 in Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US), Rockville, MD. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Center+for+Substance+Abuse+Treatment+%28US%29%2E+2014%2E+Improving+Cultural+Competence%2E+Number+59+in+Treatment+Improvement+Protocol+%28TIP%29+Series%2E+Substance+Abuse+and+Mental+Health+Services+Administration+%28US%29) 2. Neil Krishan Aggarwal, Madhumitha Balaji, Shuba Kumar, Rani Mohanraj, Atif Rahman, Helena Verdeli, Ricardo Araya, M. J. D. Jordans, Neerja Chowdhary, and Vikram Patel. 2014. Using Consumer Perspectives to Inform the Cultural Adaptation of Psychological Treatments for Depression: A Mixed Methods Stud… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Neil+Krishan+Aggarwal%2C+Madhumitha+Balaji%2C+Shuba+Kumar%2C+Rani+Mohanraj%2C+Atif+Rahman%2C+Helena+Verdeli%2C+Ricardo+Araya%2C+M%2E+J%2E+D%2E+Jordans%2C+Neerja+Chowdhary%2C+and+Vikram+Patel%2E+2014%2E+Using+Consumer+Perspective) 3. Thushari Atapattu, Mahen Herath, Charitha Elvitigala, Piyanjali de Zoysa, Kasun Gunawardana, Menasha Thilakaratne, Kasun de Zoysa, and Katrina Falkner. 2022. EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from Two South Asian Countries. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Comp… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Thushari+Atapattu%2C+Mahen+Herath%2C+Charitha+Elvitigala%2C+Piyanjali+de+Zoysa%2C+Kasun+Gunawardana%2C+Menasha+Thilakaratne%2C+Kasun+de+Zoysa%2C+and+Katrina+Falkner%2E+2022%2E+EmoMent%3A+An+Emotion+Annotated+Mental+Healt) *Updated 23 October 2026*