Distant supervision for mental health management in social media: Suicide risk classification system development study

Background: Web-based social media provides common people with a platform to express their emotions conveniently and anonymously. There have been nearly 2 million messages in a particular Chinese social media data source, and several thousands more are generated each day. Therefore, it has become impossible to analyze these messages manually. However, these messages have been identified as an important data source for the prevention of suicide related to depression disorder. Objective: We proposed in this paper a distant supervision approach to developing a system that can automatically identify textual comments that are indicative of a high suicide risk. Methods: To avoid expensive manual data annotations, we used a knowledge graph method to produce approximate annotations for distant supervision, which provided a basis for a deep learning architecture that was built and refined by interactions with psychology experts. There were three annotation levels, as follows: free annotations (zero cost), easy annotations (by psychology students), and hard annotations (by psychology experts). Results: Our system was evaluated accordingly and showed that its performance at each level was promising. By combining our system with several important psychology features from user blogs, we obtained a precision of 80.75%, a recall of 75.41%, and an F1 score of 77.98% for the hardest test data. Conclusions: In this paper, we proposed a distant supervision approach to develop an automatic system that can classify high and low suicide risk based on social media comments. The model can therefore provide volunteers with early warnings to prevent social media users from committing suicide.