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Explainable AI for Mental Health
NIDHI: Explainable Suicide Risk Detection
1st-place system (out of 55 teams) in the IEEE BigData 2026 Cup's Explainable Suicide Risk Detection challenge — combining task-specific modeling with knowledge-guided approaches to assess suicide risk from Reddit posts with grounded evidence and interpretable explanations.
Overview
1st-place system (out of 55 teams) in the IEEE BigData 2026 Cup's Explainable Suicide Risk Detection challenge — combining task-specific modeling with knowledge-guided approaches to assess suicide risk from Reddit posts with grounded evidence and interpretable explanations.
Details
NIDHI (Neurosymbolic Intelligent Diagnostics for Holistic Trauma-Informed Care) is the team of Shlok Shelat, Shrey Salvi, Souvik Roy, Manas Gaur, and Amit Sheth, competing in the IEEE Big Data Cup — part of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2026).
The Challenge
The Explainable Suicide Risk Detection challenge asks systems to assess suicide risk from Reddit posts the way a clinician would: predicting a risk level, extracting the specific post text that supports that assessment, and identifying the relevant clinical risk and protective factors — not just a label.
Our Approach
NIDHI’s system combines task-specific modeling with knowledge-guided approaches to improve both prediction performance and explainability. The team explored multiple modelling strategies for risk classification and evidence extraction, incorporating structured, task-specific knowledge into the pipeline. The final system was built to deliver strong predictive performance alongside meaningful evidence and interpretable explanations for every prediction.
Result
1st place out of 55 participating teams.
- Competition start: May 10, 2026
- Final solution submission: August 31, 2026
- Final results announced: September 15, 2026
- Paper submission deadline: October 15, 2026
- Conference: IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2026, December 14–17, 2026, Sheraton Phoenix Downtown, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Status
The competition report is available as a preprint. A full paper is in preparation ahead of the October 15, 2026 submission deadline.