Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Early Detection of Depression

Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Early Detection of Depression

Zhiling Zhang, Siyuan Chen, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI for Good. Pages 5220-5226. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/725

Depression is a prominent health challenge to the world, and early risk detection (ERD) of depression from online posts can be a promising technique for combating the threat. Early depression detection faces the challenge of efficiently tackling streaming data, balancing the tradeoff between timeliness, accuracy and explainability. To tackle these challenges, we propose a psychiatric scale guided risky post screening method that can capture risky posts related to the dimensions defined in clinical depression scales, and providing interpretable diagnostic basis. A Hierarchical Attentional Network equipped with BERT (HAN-BERT) is proposed to further advance explainable predictions. For ERD, we propose an online algorithm based on an evolving queue of risky posts that can significantly reduce the number of model inferences to boost efficiency. Experiments show that our method outperforms the competitive feature-based and neural models under conventional depression detection settings, and achieves simultaneous improvement in both efficacy and efficiency for ERD.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Text Classification
Machine Learning: Time-series; Data Streams
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Explainability and Interpretability
Humans and AI: Computational Sustainability and Human Well-Being
Machine Learning: Attention Models
Machine Learning: Classification
Machine Learning: Sequence and Graph Learning
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Ethical, Legal and Societal Issues
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Health and Medicine
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Sustainable Development Goals
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Web and Social Networks
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: General
Natural Language Processing: General