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Detection of Suicidal Twitter Posts

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Advances in Computational Intelligence Systems (UKCI 2019)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1043))

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Abstract

As web data evolves, new technological challenges arise and one of the contributing factors to these challenges is the online social networks. Although they have some benefits, their negative impact on vulnerable users such as the spread of suicidal ideation is concerning. As such, it is vital to fine tune the approaches and techniques in order to understand the users and their context for early intervention. Therefore, in this study, we measured the impact of data manipulation and feature extraction, specifically using N-grams, on suicide-related social network text (tweets). We propose a diversified ensemble approach (multi-classifier fusion) to improve the detection of suicide-related text classification. Four machine classifiers were used for the fusion: Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree. The results of our proposed approach have shown that the multi-classifier fusion has improved the detection of suicide-related text and, also, that Support Vector Machine has shown some promising results when dealing with multi-class datasets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.knime.com.

  2. 2.

    http://www.crowdflower.com.

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Acknowledgement

This is an independent research that is supported by the Petroleum Development Technology Fund (PTDF) and the Department of Health Policy Research Programme (Understanding the Role of Social Media in the Aftermath of Youth Suicides, Project Number 023/0165). The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of PTDF or Department of Health.

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Correspondence to Fatima Chiroma .

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Chiroma, F., Cocea, M., Liu, H. (2020). Detection of Suicidal Twitter Posts. In: Ju, Z., Yang, L., Yang, C., Gegov, A., Zhou, D. (eds) Advances in Computational Intelligence Systems. UKCI 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1043. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29933-0_26

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