Exploring Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Multiclass Prediction of Mental Health Status on Social Media

Sourabh Zanwar, Daniel Wiechmann, Yu Qiao, Elma Kerz


Abstract
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in research on automatic mental health detection (MHD) from social media data leveraging advances in natural language processing and machine learning techniques. While significant progress has been achieved in this interdisciplinary research area, the vast majority of work has treated MHD as a binary classification task. The multiclass classification setup is, however, essential if we are to uncover the subtle differences among the statistical patterns of language use associated with particular mental health conditions. Here, we report on experiments aimed at predicting six conditions (anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and psychological stress) from Reddit social media posts. We explore and compare the performance of hybrid and ensemble models leveraging transformer-based architectures (BERT and RoBERTa) and BiLSTM neural networks trained on within-text distributions of a diverse set of linguistic features. This set encompasses measures of syntactic complexity, lexical sophistication and diversity, readability, and register-specific ngram frequencies, as well as sentiment and emotion lexicons. In addition, we conduct feature ablation experiments to investigate which types of features are most indicative of particular mental health conditions.
Anthology ID:
2022.louhi-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Alberto Lavelli, Eben Holderness, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Anne-Lyse Minard, James Pustejovsky, Fabio Rinaldi
Venue:
Louhi
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
184–196
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.louhi-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.louhi-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sourabh Zanwar, Daniel Wiechmann, Yu Qiao, and Elma Kerz. 2022. Exploring Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Multiclass Prediction of Mental Health Status on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI), pages 184–196, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Multiclass Prediction of Mental Health Status on Social Media (Zanwar et al., Louhi 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.louhi-1.21.pdf