A Psychologically Informed Part-of-Speech Analysis of Depression in Social Media

Ana-Maria Bucur, Ioana R. Podina, Liviu P. Dinu


Abstract
In this work, we provide an extensive part-of-speech analysis of the discourse of social media users with depression. Research in psychology revealed that depressed users tend to be self-focused, more preoccupied with themselves and ruminate more about their lives and emotions. Our work aims to make use of large-scale datasets and computational methods for a quantitative exploration of discourse. We use the publicly available depression dataset from the Early Risk Prediction on the Internet Workshop (eRisk) 2018 and extract part-of-speech features and several indices based on them. Our results reveal statistically significant differences between the depressed and non-depressed individuals confirming findings from the existing psychology literature. Our work provides insights regarding the way in which depressed individuals are expressing themselves on social media platforms, allowing for better-informed computational models to help monitor and prevent mental illnesses.
Anthology ID:
2021.ranlp-1.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)
Month:
September
Year:
2021
Address:
Held Online
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
199–207
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.24
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana-Maria Bucur, Ioana R. Podina, and Liviu P. Dinu. 2021. A Psychologically Informed Part-of-Speech Analysis of Depression in Social Media. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), pages 199–207, Held Online. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
A Psychologically Informed Part-of-Speech Analysis of Depression in Social Media (Bucur et al., RANLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/2021.ranlp-1.24.pdf