The number of depression and suicide risk cases on social media platforms is ever-increasing, and the lack of depression detection mechanisms on these platforms is becoming increasingly apparent. A majority of work in this area has focused on leveraging linguistic features while dealing with small-scale datasets. However, one faces many obstacles when factoring into account the vastness and inherent imbalance of social media content. In this paper, we aim to optimize the performance of user-level depression classification to lessen the burden on computational resources. The resulting system executes in a quicker, more efficient manner, in turn making it suitable for deployment. To simulate a platform agnostic framework, we simultaneously replicate the size and composition of social media to identify victims of depression. We systematically design a solution that categorizes post embeddings, obtained by fine-tuning transformer models such as RoBERTa, and derives user-level representations using hierarchical attention networks. We also introduce a novel mental health dataset to enhance the performance of depression categorization. We leverage accounts of depression taken from this dataset to infuse domain-specific elements into our framework. Our proposed methods outperform numerous baselines across standard metrics for the task of depression detection in text.

This paper describes our systems for CLPsych?s 2022 Shared Task. Subtask A involves capturing moments of change in an individual?s mood over time, while Subtask B asked us to identify the suicidality risk of a user. We explore multiple machine learning and deep learning methods for the same, taking real-life applicability into account while considering the design of the architecture. Our team achieved top results in different categories for both subtasks. Task A was evaluated on a post-level (using macro averaged F1) and on a window-based timeline level (using macro-averaged precision and recall). We scored a post-level F1 of 0.520 and ranked second with a timeline-level recall of 0.646. Task B was a user-level task where we also came in second with a micro F1 of 0.520 and scored third place on the leaderboard with a macro F1 of 0.380.

Memes are steadily taking over the feeds of the public on social media. There is always the threat of malicious users on the internet posting offensive content, even through memes. Hence, the automatic detection of offensive images/memes is imperative along with detection of offensive text. However, this is a much more complex task as it involves both visual cues as well as language understanding and cultural/context knowledge. This paper describes our approach to the task of SemEval-2020 Task 8: Memotion Analysis. We chose to participate only in Task A which dealt with Sentiment Classification, which we formulated as a text classification problem. Through our experiments, we explored multiple training models to evaluate the performance of simple text classification algorithms on the raw text obtained after running OCR on meme images. Our submitted model achieved an accuracy of 72.69% and exceeded the existing baseline’s Macro F1 score by 8% on the official test dataset. Apart from describing our official submission, we shall elucidate how different classification models respond to this task.