Detection of Depression-Related Posts in Reddit Social Media Forum

Depression is viewed as the largest contributor to global disability and a major reason for suicide. It has an impact on the language usage reflected in the written text. The key objective of our study is to examine Reddit users' posts to detect any factors that may reveal the depression attitudes of relevant online users. For such purpose, we employ the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning approaches to train the data and evaluate the efficiency of our proposed method. We identify a lexicon of terms that are more common among depressed accounts. The results show that our proposed method can significantly improve performance accuracy. The best single feature is bigram with the…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 61572102, 61602078, 61572098, 61632011
• CP
  China Postdoctoral Science Foundation

  Award: 2018M641691
• FR
  Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

  Award: DUT18ZD102