Tweeting Your Mental Health: an Exploration of Different Classifiers and Features with Emotional Signals in Identifying Mental Health Conditions

Abstract

Applying simple natural language processing methods on social media data have shown to be able to reveal insights of specific mental disorders. However, few studies have employed fine-grained sentiment or emotion related analysis approaches in the detection of mental health conditions from social media messages. This work, for the first time, employed fine-grained emotions as features and examined five popular machine learning classifiers in the task of identifying users with self-reported mental health conditions (i.e. Bipolar, Depression, PTSD, and SAD) from the general public. We demonstrated that the support vector machines and the random forests classifiers with emotion-based features and combined features showed promising improvements to the performance on this task.