Depression is a highly prevalent condition recognized by the World Health Organization as a leading contributor to global disability. Many people suffering from depression express their thoughts and feelings using social media, which thus becomes a source of data for research in this domain. However, existing annotation schemes tailored to studying depression symptoms in social media data remain limited. Reliable and valid annotation guidelines are crucial for accurately measuring mental health conditions for those studies. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a novel depression annotation scheme and guidelines for detecting depression symptoms and their severity in social media text. Our approach leverages validated depression questionnaires and incorporates the expertise of psychologists and psychiatrists during scheme refinement. The resulting annotation scheme achieves high inter-rater agreement, demonstrating its potential for suitable depression assessment in social media contexts.

Text classification tasks which aim at harvesting and/or organizing information from electronic health records are pivotal to support clinical and translational research. However these present specific challenges compared to other classification tasks, notably due to the particular nature of the medical lexicon and language used in clinical records. Recent advances in embedding methods have shown promising results for several clinical tasks, yet there is no exhaustive comparison of such approaches with other commonly used word representations and classification models. In this work, we analyse the impact of various word representations, text pre-processing and classification algorithms on the performance of four different text classification tasks. The results show that traditional approaches, when tailored to the specific language and structure of the text inherent to the classification task, can achieve or exceed the performance of more recent ones based on contextual embeddings such as BERT.

An interface for building, improving and customising a given Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NER+L) model for biomedical domain text, and the efficient collation of accurate research use case specific training data and subsequent model training. Screencast demo available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM914DQjvSo