Interpretable depression detection from social media using hierarchical attention network with depressive indicators

Abstract

In order to effectively diagnose depression, which is one of the most harmful mental disorders, many researchers used social media by analyzing the differences in language use. However, detecting depression from social media has problems such as a small proportion of posts with depression indicators and difficulties for distinguishing depressive symptoms from temporarily depressed feelings. To address these problems, we propose hierarchical attention with depressive indicators inspired by the process of diagnosing depression by a person with domain knowledge. Our model provides not only interpretations, but also their visualizations with learned weights through attention mechanism. With this model, we can investigate different aspects of posts with depressive indicators based on psychological theories, which will help researchers to find useful evidence for depressive characteristics.