Fine-grained depression analysis based on Chinese micro-blog reviews

Depression is a widespread and intractable problem in modern society, which may lead to suicide ideation and behavior. Analyzing depression or suicide based on the posts of social media such as Twitter or Reddit has achieved great progress in recent years. However, most work focuses on English social media and depression prediction is typically formalized as being present or absent. In this paper, we construct a human-annotated dataset for depression analysis via Chinese microblog reviews which includes 6,100 manually-annotated posts. Our dataset includes two fine-grained tasks, namely depression degree prediction and depression cause prediction. The object of the former task is to classify a Microblog post into one of 5 categories based on the depression degree, while the object of the latter one is selecting one or multiple reasons that cause the depression from 7 predefined categories. To set up a benchmark, we design a neural model for joint depression degree and cause prediction, and compare it with several widely-used neural models such as TextCNN, BiLSTM and BERT. Our model outperforms the baselines and achieves at most 65+% F1 for depression degree prediction, 70+% F1 and 90+% AUC for depression cause prediction, which shows that neural models achieve promising results, but there is still room for improvement. Our work can extend the area of social-media-based depression analyses, and our annotated data and code can also facilitate related research.

Automated summary

Depression is a prevalent issue in modern society, and analyzing it through Chinese microblog reviews has led to the creation of a dataset with 6100 manually annotated posts for predicting depression degree and cause. A neural model was developed for joint depression degree and cause prediction, outperforming other neural models with promising results but still room for improvement in social-media-based analysis of depression.