Searching Brazilian Twitter for Signs of Mental Health Issues

Wesley Santos, Amanda Funabashi, Ivandré Paraboni


Abstract
Depression and related mental health issues are often reflected in the language employed by the individuals who suffer from these conditions and, accordingly, research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related fields have developed an increasing number of studies devoted to their recognition in social media text. Some of these studies have also attempted to go beyond recognition by focusing on the early signs of these illnesses, and by analysing the users’ publication history over time to potentially prevent further harm. The two kinds of study are of course overlapping, and often make use of supervised machine learning methods based on annotated corpora. However, as in many other fields, existing resources are largely devoted to English NLP, and there is little support for these studies in under resourced languages. To bridge this gap, in this paper we describe the initial steps towards building a novel resource of this kind - a corpus intended to support both the recognition of mental health issues and the temporal analysis of these illnesses - in the Brazilian Portuguese language, and initial results of a number of experiments in text classification addressing both tasks.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.750
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6111–6117
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.750
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wesley Santos, Amanda Funabashi, and Ivandré Paraboni. 2020. Searching Brazilian Twitter for Signs of Mental Health Issues. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6111–6117, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Searching Brazilian Twitter for Signs of Mental Health Issues (Santos et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.750.pdf