Lexicography Saves Lives (LSL): Automatically Translating Suicide-Related Language

TL;DR

This work tackles the lack of multilingual resources for suicide ideation detection and the ethical risks of cross-language translation by introducing the Lexicography Saves Lives project. It translates a 50-term seed lexicon to 200 languages using Flores 101, followed by a pilot human evaluation on selected translations and the deployment of a public participation site. The authors provide ethical guidelines, mitigation strategies for linguistic misrepresentation and bias, and a framework for multilingual lexicon evaluation. This effort aims to enable globally inclusive, culturally aware suicide prevention tools and to foster ongoing community collaboration and transparency.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a marked increase in research that aims to identify or predict risk, intention or ideation of suicide. The majority of new tasks, datasets, language models and other resources focus on English and on suicide in the context of Western culture. However, suicide is global issue and reducing suicide rate by 2030 is one of the key goals of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Previous work has used English dictionaries related to suicide to translate into different target languages due to lack of other available resources. Naturally, this leads to a variety of ethical tensions (e.g.: linguistic misrepresentation), where discourse around suicide is not present in a particular culture or country. In this work, we introduce the 'Lexicography Saves Lives Project' to address this issue and make three distinct contributions. First, we outline ethical consideration and provide overview guidelines to mitigate harm in developing suicide-related resources. Next, we translate an existing dictionary related to suicidal ideation into 200 different languages and conduct human evaluations on a subset of translated dictionaries. Finally, we introduce a public website to make our resources available and enable community participation.