SMHD : a large-scale resource for exploring online language usage for multiple mental health conditions

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Cohan, A., Desmet, B., Yates, A., Soldaini, L., MacAvaney, S., & Goharian, N.
Series
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018)
Pagination
1485-1497
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Santa Fe, USA)
Conference
27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018) (Santa Fe, USA)
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Abstract

Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled
data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users’ language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions
through their language.