Multi-Aspect Transfer Learning for Detecting Low Resource Mental Disorders on Social Media

Ana Sabina Uban, Berta Chulvi, Paolo Rosso


Abstract
Mental disorders are a serious and increasingly relevant public health issue. NLP methods have the potential to assist with automatic mental health disorder detection, but building annotated datasets for this task can be challenging; moreover, annotated data is very scarce for disorders other than depression. Understanding the commonalities between certain disorders is also important for clinicians who face the problem of shifting standards of diagnosis. We propose that transfer learning with linguistic features can be useful for approaching both the technical problem of improving mental disorder detection in the context of data scarcity, and the clinical problem of understanding the overlapping symptoms between certain disorders. In this paper, we target four disorders: depression, PTSD, anorexia and self-harm. We explore multi-aspect transfer learning for detecting mental disorders from social media texts, using deep learning models with multi-aspect representations of language (including multiple types of interpretable linguistic features). We explore different transfer learning strategies for cross-disorder and cross-platform transfer, and show that transfer learning can be effective for improving prediction performance for disorders where little annotated data is available. We offer insights into which linguistic features are the most useful vehicles for transferring knowledge, through ablation experiments, as well as error analysis.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.343
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3202–3219
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.343
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana Sabina Uban, Berta Chulvi, and Paolo Rosso. 2022. Multi-Aspect Transfer Learning for Detecting Low Resource Mental Disorders on Social Media. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3202–3219, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Aspect Transfer Learning for Detecting Low Resource Mental Disorders on Social Media (Uban et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.343.pdf
Code
 ananana/mental-disorders