Understanding the Role of Questions in Mental Health Support-Seeking Forums

Aylin Ece Gunal, Ian Stewart, Rada Mihalcea, Veronica Perez-Rosas

Abstract: People who seek mental health help online often receive supportive comments from other users, but their intentions may not be clear, as when someone asks a question that does not require a response. In this work, we explore the role of questions asked in response to support-seeking posts during online interactions centered around mental health support. We introduce a new dataset consisting of 1,089 mental health related post-response pairs from Reddit containing response questions annotated as rhetorical, information-seeking or not applicable. Through several experiments, we find that we can effectively distinguish between rhetorical and information seeking questions using linguistic features. Our findings highlight the importance of surrounding context and functional features (e.g., auxiliary verbs) as opposed to semantic (e.g., words related to mental processes) being significant predictors of question type.