Social Support Detection from Social Media Texts

TL;DR

This paper introduces the task of Social Support Detection (SSD) in social media texts, aiming to identify supportive interactions using machine learning and NLP techniques, with promising results on YouTube comments.

Contribution

It defines SSD as a new NLP task with three subtasks, and evaluates traditional and neural models using diverse linguistic and emotional features on a sizable dataset.

Findings

Psycholinguistic and emotional features improve detection accuracy.

Group-oriented support is prevalent in online comments.

Model performance ranges from 0.72 to 0.82 F1 score.

Abstract

Social support, conveyed through a multitude of interactions and platforms such as social media, plays a pivotal role in fostering a sense of belonging, aiding resilience in the face of challenges, and enhancing overall well-being. This paper introduces Social Support Detection (SSD) as a Natural language processing (NLP) task aimed at identifying supportive interactions within online communities. The study presents the task of Social Support Detection (SSD) in three subtasks: two binary classification tasks and one multiclass task, with labels detailed in the dataset section. We conducted experiments on a dataset comprising 10,000 YouTube comments. Traditional machine learning models were employed, utilizing various feature combinations that encompass linguistic, psycholinguistic, emotional, and sentiment information. Additionally, we experimented with neural network-based models using various word embeddings to enhance the performance of our models across these subtasks.The results reveal a prevalence of group-oriented support in online dialogues, reflecting broader societal patterns. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating psycholinguistic, emotional, and sentiment features with n-grams in detecting social support and distinguishing whether it is directed toward an individual or a group. The best results for different subtasks across all experiments range from 0.72 to 0.82.