NLP

PsyDefDetect Shared Task

PsyDefDetect 2026

Date 2-7 July 2026
Location San Diego, United States
Format In Person

About this Conference

A shared task focusing on detecting and classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues using Natural Language Processing techniques. The task is grounded in the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework and aims to advance understanding of unconscious defensive functioning in text.

Call for Papers

Participants are invited to analyze the PSYDEFCONV dataset, a conversational corpus with 200 dialogues and 4,709 utterances. The goal is to develop models that can recognize subtle, context-dependent defensive maneuvers across 9 categories of defensive maturity. Participants must classify utterances into seven hierarchical levels of defensive maturity and two auxiliary labels.

Important Dates

  • Task Announcement December 15, 2025
  • Task Launch on CodaBench December 20, 2025
  • Start of Evaluation Period March 15, 2026
  • End of Evaluation Period April 5, 2026
  • Conference dates 2-7 July 2026