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Towards Expectation Detection in Language: A Case Study on Treatment Expectations in Reddit

Summary

The authors propose Expectation Detection as a new NLP task: finding utterances where a writer anticipates, hopes, or fears a future outcome tied to some action or situation. Unlike sentiment or stance, the task focuses only on future-oriented mental states. Each Expectation Event can be described by its type, its basis, its certainty, and its temporal orientation. The paper tests the idea in the medical domain, because patients' beliefs about a treatment are known to affect how well it works. Online forums may also reveal concerns that patients do not raise with clinicians.

The authors built RedHOTExpect, a corpus of medical Reddit posts. An LLM filtered the posts and assigned silver labels for treatments, expectations, and outcomes, and a manually checked sample confirmed reasonable label quality. According to linguistic and qualitative analyses, posts containing expectations tend to be lengthier, more oriented toward the future, and more positive in tone than other posts. Optimism is strongest for physical conditions, while mental-health posts are more introspective. Patients mostly expect benefits. This is a first resource for treating expectation as a measurable linguistic phenomenon.

Key points

  • RedHOTExpect contains about 4.5K Reddit posts with expectations. Roughly 2.5K of them carry token-level Treatment–Expectation–Outcome (TEO) triplet annotations.
  • In a manual check of 250 instances, the LLM silver labels were correct in 77.5% of cases. This sample was also annotated for expectation and outcome type and for the basis of each expectation.
  • Of 389 verified expectations, 372 (95.6%) are Benefit, 10 are Harm, and 7 are Uncertain. Among Benefit expectations, 42.2% are followed by Benefit outcomes and 29.8% by No Effect.
  • The authors built a certainty score from the LIWC categories certitude and tentat. It did not separate aligned from misaligned expectation–outcome pairs (Mann–Whitney p = 0.86).
  • Across conditions, expectations are grounded mainly in personal experience, with authority (doctors, prescriptions) second. Social, media, and cultural sources are rare.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3d6bmefz4xyw

@inproceedings{velutharambath2026expectation,
  title = {{Towards Expectation Detection in Language: A Case Study on Treatment Expectations in Reddit}},
  author = {Velutharambath, Aswathy and Wührl, Amelie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3d6bmefz4xyw},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3d6bmefz4xyw}
}

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