Detecting Anxiety through Reddit

Judy Hanwen Shen, Frank Rudzicz


Abstract
Previous investigations into detecting mental illnesses through social media have predominately focused on detecting depression through Twitter corpora. In this paper, we study anxiety disorders through personal narratives collected through the popular social media website, Reddit. We build a substantial data set of typical and anxiety-related posts, and we apply N-gram language modeling, vector embeddings, topic analysis, and emotional norms to generate features that accurately classify posts related to binary levels of anxiety. We achieve an accuracy of 91% with vector-space word embeddings, and an accuracy of 98% when combined with lexicon-based features.
Anthology ID:
W17-3107
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology — From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, BC
Editors:
Kristy Hollingshead, Molly E. Ireland, Kate Loveys
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
58–65
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3107
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-3107
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Judy Hanwen Shen and Frank Rudzicz. 2017. Detecting Anxiety through Reddit. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology — From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, pages 58–65, Vancouver, BC. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Anxiety through Reddit (Shen & Rudzicz, CLPsych 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3107.pdf
Code
 heyyjudes/anxiety-on-reddit