Am I No Good? Towards Detecting Perceived Burdensomeness and Thwarted Belongingness from Suicide Notes

Am I No Good? Towards Detecting Perceived Burdensomeness and Thwarted Belongingness from Suicide Notes

Soumitra Ghosh, Asif Ekbal, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI for Good. Pages 5073-5079. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/704

The World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized the importance of significantly accelerating suicide prevention efforts to fulfill the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) objective of 2030. In this paper, we present an end-to-end multitask system to address a novel task of detection of two interpersonal risk factors of suicide, Perceived Burdensomeness (PB) and Thwarted Belongingness (TB) from suicide notes. We also introduce a manually translated code-mixed suicide notes corpus, CoMCEASE-v2.0, based on the benchmark CEASE-v2.0 dataset, annotated with temporal orientation, PB and TB labels. We exploit the temporal orientation and emotion information in the suicide notes to boost overall performance. For comprehensive evaluation of our proposed method, we compare it to several state-of-the-art approaches on the existing CEASE-v2.0 dataset and the newly announced CoMCEASE-v2.0 dataset. Empirical evaluation suggests that temporal and emotional information can substantially improve the detection of PB and TB.
Keywords:
Humans and AI: Computational Sustainability and Human Well-Being
Machine Learning: Attention Models
Machine Learning: Multi-task and Transfer Learning
Natural Language Processing: Resources and Evaluation
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining