TIDE: Affective Time-aware Representations for Fine-grained Depression Identification on Social Media

Zhuanzhuan Liu, Xing Ma, Peng Zhang, Chuzhan Hao, Shuo Zhang, Lin Wang

Abstract: The growing availability of the Internet provides opportunities for depression screening. In recent years, depression analysis based on social media texts has shown great promise, yet most works have focused on treating it as a binary problem. Meanwhile, existing methods need the perception of fine-grained emotions in historical contexts. Moreover, they do not consider the time interval between posts and thus ignore the decay of emotions over time. In this paper, we propose a Time-aware Depression identification model based on Emotion capturing (TIDE), a novel method to identify the severity of depression in social media users. We define the assessment as an ordinal regression problem to distinguish differences in depression levels. Specifically, TIDE uses Plutchik's wheel of emotions to characterize the emotional historical spectrum, then models the emotion decay process of historical context using a Time-aware LSTM (T-LSTM). We experiment on two Reddit public datasets to demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models. Then, ablation studies and qualitative analysis further demonstrate the validity of the proposed modules. Overall, our work can facilitate social media-based analysis of depression and shows potential for application to mental health-related issues.