Detecting Anorexia in Spanish Tweets

Pilar López Úbeda, Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco, Manuel Carlos Díaz Galiano, L. Alfonso Urena Lopez, Maite Martin

Abstract
Mental health is one of the main concerns of today’s society. Early detection of symptoms can greatly help people with mental disorders. People are using social networks more and more to express emotions, sentiments and mental states. Thus, the treatment of this information using NLP technologies can be applied to the automatic detection of mental problems such as eating disorders. However, the first step to solving the problem should be to provide a corpus in order to evaluate our systems. In this paper, we specifically focus on detecting anorexia messages on Twitter. Firstly, we have generated a new corpus of tweets extracted from different accounts including anorexia and non-anorexia messages in Spanish. The corpus is called SAD: Spanish Anorexia Detection corpus. In order to validate the effectiveness of the SAD corpus, we also propose several machine learning approaches for automatically detecting anorexia symptoms in the corpus. The good results obtained show that the application of textual classification methods is a promising option for developing this kind of system demonstrating that these tools could be used by professionals to help in the early detection of mental problems.
Anthology ID:
R19-1077
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019)
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
655–663
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/R19-1077
DOI:
10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_077
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pilar López Úbeda, Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco, Manuel Carlos Díaz Galiano, L. Alfonso Urena Lopez, and Maite Martin. 2019. Detecting Anorexia in Spanish Tweets. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), pages 655–663, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Anorexia in Spanish Tweets (López Úbeda et al., RANLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/R19-1077.pdf
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