cs.CLMay 26, 2026

Keyphrase Generative Representation of Youth Crisis Conversations Beyond Static Taxonomies

Authors: Abeer BadawiWill AitkenLydia SequeiraJocelyn RankinMaia NormanElham Dolatabadi

Organizations: York University, Canada · Vector Institute, Canada · Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Canada · Kids Help Phone, Canada

Abstract

Crisis Responders (CRs) rapidly assess thousands of youth SMS conversations each year to identify mental health concerns and guide support. Yet youth distress is increasingly expressed through evolving and context-specific language that often does not fit fixed-label taxonomies. This work analyzed 703,975 de-identified Kids Help Phone conversations (2018-2023) and expanded KHP's 19-label issue taxonomy into a 39-label hierarchical schema. We then introduce Keyphrase Generative Representation (KGR), a constrained LLM generating concise, conversation-specific keyphrases, evaluated across 129 conversations and 387 expert annotations. The expanded taxonomy achieved expert consensus reliability, with an accuracy of 0.96, and expert review found that 81% of keyphrases accurately reflected content and 74% improved clarity. KGR surfaced identity-linked themes absent from the fixed taxonomy, including immigration problems and caregiver burden, and supported a topic-retrieval workflow that increased accuracy from 0.25 to 0.70 (+0.45) over the manual analyst process. KGR marks a shift toward hybrid, interpretable generative representations that extend crisis response beyond static taxonomies to surface emerging and culturally grounded patterns of youth distress.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Expert-Level Crisis Detection in Mental Health Conversations

    Date pendingGrace Byun, Abigail Lott, Rebecca Lipschutz +3CrisisSuicide Risk