Tom Tabak


2020

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Temporal Mental Health Dynamics on Social Media
Tom Tabak | Matthew Purver
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

We describe a set of experiments for building a temporal mental health dynamics system. We utilise a pre-existing methodology for distant- supervision of mental health data mining from social media platforms and deploy the system during the global COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Despite the challenging nature of the task, we produce encouraging results, both explicit to the global pandemic and implicit to a global phenomenon, Christmas Depres- sion, supported by the literature. We propose a methodology for providing insight into tem- poral mental health dynamics to be utilised for strategic decision-making.