EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from Two South Asian Countries

Thushari Atapattu, Mahen Herath, Charitha Elvitigala, Piyanjali de Zoysa, Kasun Gunawardana, Menasha Thilakaratne, Kasun de Zoysa, Katrina Falkner


Abstract
People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person’s choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent),consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including ‘mental illness’ (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., ‘sadness’, ‘anger’). EmoMent corpus achieved ‘very good’ inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss’ Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.609
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6991–7001
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.609
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thushari Atapattu, Mahen Herath, Charitha Elvitigala, Piyanjali de Zoysa, Kasun Gunawardana, Menasha Thilakaratne, Kasun de Zoysa, and Katrina Falkner. 2022. EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from Two South Asian Countries. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6991–7001, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from Two South Asian Countries (Atapattu et al., COLING 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.609.pdf