Applying Deep Learning Technique for Depression Classification in Social Media Text

Abstract

In social media, depression identification could be regarded as a complex task because of the complicated nature associated with mental disorders. In recent times, there has been an evolution in this research area with growing popularity of social media platforms as these have become a fundamental part of people's day-to-day life. Social media platforms and their users share a close relationship due to which the users' personal life is reflected in these platforms on several levels. Apart from the associated complexity in recognising mental illnesses via social media platforms, implementing supervised machine learning approaches like deep neural networks is yet to be adopted in a large scale because of the inherent difficulties associated with procuring sufficient quantities of annotated training data. Because of such reasons, we have made effort to identify deep learning model that is most effective from amongst selected architectures with previous successful record in supervised learning methods. The selected model is employed to recognise online users that display depression; since there is limited unstructured text data that could be extracted from Twitter.