DepressionNet: A Novel Summarization Boosted Deep Framework for Depression Detection on Social Media

TL;DR

DepressionNet introduces a hybrid summarization and deep learning framework that improves automatic depression detection on social media by focusing on relevant content, outperforming existing models.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid summarization approach combined with a CNN-GRU deep learning model for more accurate depression detection from social media data.

Findings

Outperforms existing baseline models in depression detection accuracy

Effective content selection enhances model relevance and performance

Combines extractive and abstractive summarization with deep learning for better results

Abstract

Twitter is currently a popular online social media platform which allows users to share their user-generated content. This publicly-generated user data is also crucial to healthcare technologies because the discovered patterns would hugely benefit them in several ways. One of the applications is in automatically discovering mental health problems, e.g., depression. Previous studies to automatically detect a depressed user on online social media have largely relied upon the user behaviour and their linguistic patterns including user's social interactions. The downside is that these models are trained on several irrelevant content which might not be crucial towards detecting a depressed user. Besides, these content have a negative impact on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the model. To overcome the shortcomings in the existing automatic depression detection methods, we propose a novel computational framework for automatic depression detection that initially selects relevant content through a hybrid extractive and abstractive summarization strategy on the sequence of all user tweets leading to a more fine-grained and relevant content. The content then goes to our novel deep learning framework comprising of a unified learning machinery comprising of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) coupled with attention-enhanced Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) models leading to better empirical performance than existing strong baselines.