Can adult mental health be predicted by childhood future-self narratives? Insights from the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task

Kylie Radford, Louise Lavrencic, Ruth Peters, Kim Kiely, Ben Hachey, Scott Nowson, Will Radford


Abstract
The CLPsych 2018 Shared Task B explores how childhood essays can predict psychological distress throughout the author’s life. Our main aim was to build tools to help our psychologists understand the data, propose features and interpret predictions. We submitted two linear regression models: ModelA uses simple demographic and word-count features, while ModelB uses linguistic, entity, typographic, expert-gazetteer, and readability features. Our models perform best at younger prediction ages, with our best unofficial score at 23 of 0.426 disattenuated Pearson correlation. This task is challenging and although predictive performance is limited, we propose that tight integration of expertise across computational linguistics and clinical psychology is a productive direction.
Anthology ID:
W18-0614
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, LA
Editors:
Kate Loveys, Kate Niederhoffer, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Rebecca Resnik, Philip Resnik
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
126–135
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0614
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0614
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kylie Radford, Louise Lavrencic, Ruth Peters, Kim Kiely, Ben Hachey, Scott Nowson, and Will Radford. 2018. Can adult mental health be predicted by childhood future-self narratives? Insights from the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic, pages 126–135, New Orleans, LA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can adult mental health be predicted by childhood future-self narratives? Insights from the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task (Radford et al., CLPsych 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0614.pdf