Towards Suicide Prevention: Early Detection of Depression on Social Media [chapter]

Victor Leiva, Ana Freire
2017 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
The statistics presented by the World Health Organization inform that 90% of the suicides can be attributed to mental illnesses in high-income countries. Besides, previous studies concluded that people with mental illnesses tend to reveal their mental condition on social media, as a way of relief. Thus, the main objective of this work is the analysis of the messages that a user posts online, sequentially through a time period, and detect as soon as possible if this user is at risk of
more » ... This paper is a preliminary attempt to minimize measures that penalize the delay in detecting positive cases. Our experiments underline the importance of an exhaustive sentiment analysis and a combination of learning algorithms to detect early symptoms of depression.
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_34 fatcat:jamidwvbgfgltjklgbvtpyjjbm