A Time-Aware Transformer Based Model for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media

Ramit Sawhney, Harshit Joshi, Saumya Gandhi, Rajiv Ratn Shah


Abstract
Social media’s ubiquity fosters a space for users to exhibit suicidal thoughts outside of traditional clinical settings. Understanding the build-up of such ideation is critical for the identification of at-risk users and suicide prevention. Suicide ideation is often linked to a history of mental depression. The emotional spectrum of a user’s historical activity on social media can be indicative of their mental state over time. In this work, we focus on identifying suicidal intent in English tweets by augmenting linguistic models with historical context. We propose STATENet, a time-aware transformer based model for preliminary screening of suicidal risk on social media. STATENet outperforms competitive methods, demonstrating the utility of emotional and temporal contextual cues for suicide risk assessment. We discuss the empirical, qualitative, practical, and ethical aspects of STATENet for suicide ideation detection.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.619
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7685–7697
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.619
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.619
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramit Sawhney, Harshit Joshi, Saumya Gandhi, and Rajiv Ratn Shah. 2020. A Time-Aware Transformer Based Model for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7685–7697, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Time-Aware Transformer Based Model for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media (Sawhney et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.619.pdf