Yudong Zhang


2021

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Weakly-Supervised Methods for Suicide Risk Assessment: Role of Related Domains
Chenghao Yang | Yudong Zhang | Smaranda Muresan
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Social media has become a valuable resource for the study of suicidal ideation and the assessment of suicide risk. Among social media platforms, Reddit has emerged as the most promising one due to its anonymity and its focus on topic-based communities (subreddits) that can be indicative of someone’s state of mind or interest regarding mental health disorders such as r/SuicideWatch, r/Anxiety, r/depression. A challenge for previous work on suicide risk assessment has been the small amount of labeled data. We propose an empirical investigation into several classes of weakly-supervised approaches, and show that using pseudo-labeling based on related issues around mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) helps improve model performance for suicide risk assessment.