Anh C. Pham


2024

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Inferring Mental Burnout Discourse Across Reddit Communities
Nazanin Sabri | Anh C. Pham | Ishita Kakkar | Mai ElSherief
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact

Mental burnout refers to a psychological syndrome induced by chronic stress that negatively impacts the emotional and physical well-being of individuals. From the occupational context to personal hobbies, burnout is pervasive across domains and therefore affects the morale and productivity of society as a whole. Currently, no linguistic resources are available for the analysis or detection of burnout language. We address this gap by introducing a dataset annotated for burnout language. Given that social media is a platform for sharing life experiences and mental health struggles, our work examines the manifestation of burnout language in Reddit posts. We introduce a contextual word sense disambiguation approach to identify the specific meaning or context in which the word “burnout” is used, distinguishing between its application in mental health (e.g., job-related stress leading to burnout) and non-mental health contexts (e.g., engine burnout in a mechanical context). We create a dataset of 2,330 manually labeled Reddit posts for this task, as well as annotating the reason the poster associates with their burnout (e.g., professional, personal, non-traditional). We train machine learning models on this dataset achieving a minimum F1 score of 0.84 on the different tasks. We make our dataset of annotated Reddit post IDs publicly available to help advance future research in this field.