The ever-growing number of people suffering from mental distress has motivated significant research initiatives towards automated depression estimation. Despite the multidisciplinary nature of the task, very few of these approaches include medical professionals in their research process, thus ignoring a vital source of domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose to bring the domain experts back into the loop and incorporate their knowledge within the gold-standard DAIC-WOZ dataset. In particular, we define a novel transformer-based architecture and analyse its performance in light of our expert annotations. Overall findings demonstrate a strong correlation between the psychological tendencies of medical professionals and the behavior of the proposed model, which additionally provides new state-of-the-art results.

Automated depression estimation has received significant research attention in recent years as a result of its growing impact on the global community. Within the context of studies based on patient-therapist interview transcripts, most researchers treat the dyadic discourse as a sequence of unstructured sentences, thus ignoring the discourse structure within the learning process. In this paper we propose Multi-view architectures that divide the input transcript into patient and therapist views based on sentence type in an attempt to utilize symmetric discourse structure for improved model performance. Experiments on DAIC-WOZ dataset for binary classification task within depression estimation show advantages of Multi-view architecture over sequential input representations. Our model also outperforms the current state-of-the-art results and provide new SOTA performance on test set of DAIC-WOZ dataset.