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Towards Suicide Prevention: Early Detection of Depression on Social Media

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Internet Science (INSCI 2017)

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Abstract

The statistics presented by the World Health Organization inform that 90% of the suicides can be attributed to mental illnesses in high-income countries. Besides, previous studies concluded that people with mental illnesses tend to reveal their mental condition on social media, as a way of relief. Thus, the main objective of this work is the analysis of the messages that a user posts online, sequentially through a time period, and detect as soon as possible if this user is at risk of depression. This paper is a preliminary attempt to minimize measures that penalize the delay in detecting positive cases. Our experiments underline the importance of an exhaustive sentiment analysis and a combination of learning algorithms to detect early symptoms of depression.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reddit: https://www.reddit.com.

  2. 2.

    LIWC: http://liwc.wpengine.com/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502).

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Correspondence to Ana Freire .

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Leiva, V., Freire, A. (2017). Towards Suicide Prevention: Early Detection of Depression on Social Media. In: Kompatsiaris, I., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10673. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_34

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