Amritha S


2023

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Flamingos_python@LT-EDI-2023: An Ensemble Model to Detect Severity of Depression
Abirami P S | Amritha S | Pavithra Meganathan | Jerin Mahibha C
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

The prevalence of depression is increasing globally, and there is a need for effective screening and detection tools. Social media platforms offer a rich source of data for mental health research. The paper aims to detect the signs of depression of a person from their social media postings wherein people share their feelings and emotions. The task is to create a system that, given social media posts in English, should classify the level of depression as ‘not depressed’, ‘moderately depressed’ or ‘severely depressed’. The paper presents the solution for the Shared Task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text at LT-EDI@RANLP 2023. The proposed system aims to develop a machine learning model using machine learning algorithms like SVM, Random forest and Naive Bayes to detect signs of depression from social media text. The model is trained on a dataset of social media posts to detect the level of depression of the individuals as ‘not depressed’, ‘moderately depressed’ or ‘severely depressed’. The dataset is pre-processed to remove duplicates and irrelevant features, and then, feature engineering techniques is used to extract meaningful features from the text data. The model is trained on these features to classify the text into the three categories. The performance of the model is evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The ensemble model is used to combine these algorithms which gives accuracy of 90.2% and the F1 score is 0.90. The results of the proposed approach could potentially aid in the early detection and prevention of depression for individuals who may be at risk.