Sakinah-AI: Optimized AraBERT for Arabic Mental Health Question Classification

This repository contains the official fine-tuned model Sakinah-AI-AraBERT-Optimized, one of our submissions to the MentalQA 2025 Shared Task (Track 1).

By: Fatimah Emad Elden & Mumina Abukar

Cairo University & The University of South Wales

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📖 Model Description

This model is a fine-tuned version of aubmindlab/bert-base-arabertv2 for multi-label classification of Arabic questions related to mental health. It was trained on the AraHealthQA dataset.

Our approach involved a comprehensive hyperparameter search using the Optuna framework to find the optimal configuration. To address class imbalance, the model was trained using a custom Focal Loss function. This optimized fine-tuning approach significantly outperformed its k-fold ensemble counterpart. On the official blind test set, this model achieved a Weighted F1-score of 0.543.

The model predicts one or more of the following labels for a given question:

• A: Diagnosis (Interpreting symptoms)
• B: Treatment (Seeking therapies or medications)
• C: Anatomy and Physiology (Basic medical knowledge)
• D: Epidemiology (Course, prognosis, causes of diseases)
• E: Healthy Lifestyle (Diet, exercise, mood control)
• F: Provider Choices (Recommendations for doctors)
• Z: Other (Does not fit other categories)

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🚀 How to Use

You can use this model directly with the transformers library pipeline for text-classification.

from transformers import pipeline

# Load the classification pipeline
classifier = pipeline(
    "text-classification",
    model="FatimahEmadEldin/Sakinah-AI-AraBERT-Optimized",
    return_all_scores=True # Set to True for multi-label output
)

# Example question in Arabic
question = "ما هي أعراض الاكتئاب وكيف يمكن علاجه؟"
# (Translation: "What are the symptoms of depression and how can it be treated?")

results = classifier(question)

# --- Post-processing to get final labels ---
# The optimal threshold must be determined from your Optuna study results.
# The evaluation script uses a placeholder of 0.45.
# Replace with the actual best_params['base_threshold'] value.
threshold = 0.45 
predicted_labels = [item['label'] for item in results[0] if item['score'] > threshold]

print(f"Question: {question}")
# Expected output for this example would likely include 'Diagnosis' and 'Treatment'
print(f"Predicted Labels: {predicted_labels}")
# Expected: ['A', 'B']

⚙️ Training Procedure

This model was fine-tuned using a rigorous hyperparameter optimization process.

Hyperparameters

The best hyperparameters were found by Optuna during the training process (arabert_optmized.py). You will need to retrieve these values from the output of your Optuna study (study.best_params).

Of course! Here is the information formatted into Markdown tables.

Optimization Results

Best Hyperparameters Found

Frameworks

• PyTorch
• Hugging Face Transformers
• Optuna

📊 Evaluation Results

The model was evaluated on the blind test set provided by the MentalQA organizers.

Final Test Set Scores

Per-Label Performance (Test Set)

Note: The following is a placeholder. To generate the actual report, run the arabert_evaluate.py script with your final model and the official test data.

--- Per-Label Performance (Test Set) ---
              precision    recall  f1-score   support

           A       0.65      0.81      0.72        84
           B       0.60      0.75      0.67        85
           C       0.00      0.00      0.00        10
           D       0.37      0.21      0.26        34
           E       0.41      0.37      0.39        38
           F       0.00      0.00      0.00         6
           Z       0.00      0.00      0.00         3

   micro avg       0.58      0.59      0.58       260
   macro avg       0.29      0.31      0.29       260
weighted avg       0.51      0.59      0.54       260
 samples avg       0.65      0.65      0.60       260

📜 Citation

If you use our work, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{elden2025sakinahai,
    title={{Sakinah-AI at MentalQA: A Comparative Study of Few-Shot, Optimized, and Ensemble Methods for Arabic Mental Health Question Classification}},
    author={Elden, Fatimah Emad and Abukar, Mumina},
    year={2025},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the MentalQA 2025 Shared Task},
    eprint={25XX.XXXXX},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}