Depression and Self-Harm Risk Assessment in Online Forums

Users suffering from mental health conditions often turn to online resources for support, including specialized online support communities or general communities such as Twitter and Reddit. In this work, we present a neural framework for supporting and studying users in both types of communities. We propose methods for identifying posts in support communities that may indicate a risk of self-harm, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong previously proposed methods for identifying such posts. Self-harm is closely related to depression, which makes identifying depressed users on general forums a crucial related task. We introduce a large-scale general forum dataset ("RSDD") consisting of users with self-reported depression diagnoses matched with control users. We show how our method can be applied to effectively identify depressed users from their use of language alone. We demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines on this general forum dataset.Comment: Expanded version of EMNLP17 paper. Added sections 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, FastText baseline, and CNN-

Identifying personality and topics of social media

Title from PDF of title page viewed January 27, 2020Thesis advisor: Yugyung LeeVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 37-39)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2019Twitter and Facebook are the renowned social networking platforms where users post, share, interact and express to the world, their interests, personality, and behavioral information. User-created content on social media can be a source of truth, which is suitable to be consumed for the personality identification of social media users. Personality assessment using the Big 5 personality factor model benefits organizations in identifying potential professionals, future leaders, best-fit candidates for the role, and build effective teams. Also, the Big 5 personality factors help to understand depression symptoms among aged people in primary care. We had hypothesized that understanding the user personality of the social network would have significant benefits for topic modeling of different areas like news, towards understanding community interests, and topics. In this thesis, we will present a multi-label personality classification of the social media data and topic feature classification model based on the Big 5 model. We have built the Big 5 personality classification model using a Twitter dataset that has defined openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In this thesis, we (1) conduct personality detection using the Big 5 model, (2) extract the topics from Facebook and Twitter data based on each personality, (3) analyze the top essential topics, and (4) find the relation between topics and personalities. The personality would be useful to identify what kind of personality, which topics usually talk about in social media. Multi-label classification is done using Multinomial Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Linear SVC. Topic Modeling is done based on LDA and KATE. Experimental results with Twitter and Facebook data demonstrate that the proposed model has achieved promising results.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Proposed framework -- Results and evaluations -- Conclusion and future wor

What Twitter Profile and Posted Images Reveal About Depression and Anxiety

Previous work has found strong links between the choice of social media images and users' emotions, demographics and personality traits. In this study, we examine which attributes of profile and posted images are associated with depression and anxiety of Twitter users. We used a sample of 28,749 Facebook users to build a language prediction model of survey-reported depression and anxiety, and validated it on Twitter on a sample of 887 users who had taken anxiety and depression surveys. We then applied it to a different set of 4,132 Twitter users to impute language-based depression and anxiety labels, and extracted interpretable features of posted and profile pictures to uncover the associations with users' depression and anxiety, controlling for demographics. For depression, we find that profile pictures suppress positive emotions rather than display more negative emotions, likely because of social media self-presentation biases. They also tend to show the single face of the user (rather than show her in groups of friends), marking increased focus on the self, emblematic for depression. Posted images are dominated by grayscale and low aesthetic cohesion across a variety of image features. Profile images of anxious users are similarly marked by grayscale and low aesthetic cohesion, but less so than those of depressed users. Finally, we show that image features can be used to predict depression and anxiety, and that multitask learning that includes a joint modeling of demographics improves prediction performance. Overall, we find that the image attributes that mark depression and anxiety offer a rich lens into these conditions largely congruent with the psychological literature, and that images on Twitter allow inferences about the mental health status of users.Comment: ICWSM 201