Toward Macro-Insights for Suicide Prevention: Analyzing Fine-Grained Distress at Scale

Christopher M. Homan, Ravdeep Johar, Tong Liu, Megan Lytle, Vincent Silenzio, Cecilia O. Alm

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

59 Scopus citations

Abstract

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. One of the major challenges to suicide prevention is that those who may be most at risk cannot be relied upon to report their conditions to clinicians. This paper takes an initial step toward the automatic detection of suicidal risk factors through social media activity, with no reliance on self-reporting. We consider the performance of annotators with various degrees of expertise in suicide prevention at annotating microblog data for the purpose of training text-based models for detecting suicide risk behaviors. Consistent with crowdsourcing literature, we found that novice-novice annotator pairs underperform expert annotators and outperform automatic lexical analysis tools, such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationWorkshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, CLPsych 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Proceedings
EditorsPhilip Resnik, Rebecca Resnik, Margaret Mitchell
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages107-117
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781941643167
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event2014 Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, CLPsych 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Baltimore, United States
Duration: Jun 27 2014 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference2014 Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, CLPsych 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore
Period6/27/14 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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