Many Ways to Be Lonely: Fine-Grained Characterization of Loneliness and Its Potential Changes in COVID-19

TL;DR

This study develops a dataset and models to analyze how different forms of loneliness are expressed and coped with among young adults, revealing distinct patterns and potential impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Contribution

The paper introduces FIG-Loneliness, a novel dataset with fine-grained annotations, and demonstrates high-accuracy models for classifying loneliness types and coping strategies in online forums.

Findings

Loneliness expressions differ between young adult forums and other groups.

Models achieved over 97% accuracy in binary loneliness detection.

Different loneliness forms are associated with distinct coping strategies.

Abstract

Loneliness has been associated with negative outcomes for physical and mental health. Understanding how people express and cope with various forms of loneliness is critical for early screening and targeted interventions to reduce loneliness, particularly among vulnerable groups such as young adults. To examine how different forms of loneliness and coping strategies manifest in loneliness self-disclosure, we built a dataset, FIG-Loneliness (FIne-Grained Loneliness) by using Reddit posts in two young adult-focused forums and two loneliness related forums consisting of a diverse age group. We provided annotations by trained human annotators for binary and fine-grained loneliness classifications of the posts. Trained on FIG-Loneliness, two BERT-based models were used to understand loneliness forms and authors' coping strategies in these forums. Our binary loneliness classification achieved an accuracy above 97%, and fine-grained loneliness category classification reached an average accuracy of 77% across all labeled categories. With FIG-Loneliness and model predictions, we found that loneliness expressions in the young adults related forums were distinct from other forums. Those in young adult-focused forums were more likely to express concerns pertaining to peer relationship, and were potentially more sensitive to geographical isolation impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Also, we showed that different forms of loneliness have differential use in coping strategies.