Exploring the Suitability of Transformer Models to Analyse Mental Health Peer Support Forum Data for a Realist Evaluation
Matthew Coole, Paul Rayson, Zoe Glossop, Fiona Lobban, Paul Marshall, John Vidler
Abstract
Mental health peer support forums have become widely used in recent years. The emerging mental health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have meant that finding a place online for support and advice when dealing with mental health issues is more critical than ever. The need to examine, understand and find ways to improve the support provided by mental health forums is vital in the current climate. As part of this, we present our initial explorations in using modern transformer models to detect four key concepts (connectedness, lived experience, empathy and gratitude), which we believe are essential to understanding how people use mental health forums and will serve as a basis for testing more expansive realise theories about mental health forums in the future. As part of this work, we also replicate previously published results on empathy utilising an existing annotated dataset and test the other concepts on our manually annotated mental health forum posts dataset. These results serve as a basis for future research examining peer support forums.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.cl4health-1.22
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Paul Thompson, Brian Ondov
- Venues:
- CL4Health | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 184–188
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.22
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Matthew Coole, Paul Rayson, Zoe Glossop, Fiona Lobban, Paul Marshall, and John Vidler. 2024. Exploring the Suitability of Transformer Models to Analyse Mental Health Peer Support Forum Data for a Realist Evaluation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 184–188, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Exploring the Suitability of Transformer Models to Analyse Mental Health Peer Support Forum Data for a Realist Evaluation (Coole et al., CL4Health-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.cl4health-1.22.pdf