Users suffering from mental health conditions often turn to online resources for support, including specialized online support communities or general communities such as Twitter and Reddit. In this work, we present a neural framework for supporting and studying users in both types of communities. We propose methods for identifying posts in support communities that may indicate a risk of self-harm, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong previously proposed methods for identifying such posts. Self-harm is closely related to depression, which makes identifying depressed users on general forums a crucial related task. We introduce a large-scale general forum dataset ("RSDD") consisting of users with self-reported depression diagnoses matched with control users. We show how our method can be applied to effectively identify depressed users from their use of language alone. We demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines on this general forum dataset.
In addition to general studies addressing mental health, related work has also specifically studied suicide and self-harm through social media @cite_32 @cite_23 @cite_11 @cite_29 @cite_34 . Recently, CLPsych 2016 @cite_14 investigated approaches for detecting the self-harm risk of mental health forum posts @cite_40 . Most related work in this area uses variations of linear classifiers with some sort of feature engineering; successful methods have employed: a combination of sparse (bag-of-words) and dense (doc2vec) representation of the target forum posts @cite_2 , a stack of feature-rich Random Forest and linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) @cite_6 , an RBF SVM classifier utilizing similar sets of features @cite_16 , and various contextual and psycholinguistic features @cite_17 @cite_25 . In contrast to the above works, our model does not use any general or domain specific feature engineering; it learns appropriate representations of documents by considering only their textual content.
@cite_14 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_16 @cite_17 @cite_40 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_34 @cite_25 @cite_11
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This paper describes the Data61-CSIRO text classification systems submitted as part of the CLPsych 2016 shared task. The aim of the shared task is to develop automated systems that can help mental health professionals with the process of triaging posts with ideations of depression and or self-harm. We structured our participation in the CLPsych 2016 shared task in order to focus on different facets of modelling online forum discussions: (i) vector space representations; (ii) different text granularities; and (iii) fine- versus coarse-grained labels indicating concern. We achieved an F1score of 0.42 using an ensemble classification approach that predicts fine-grained labels of concern. This was the best score obtained by any submitted system in the 2016 shared task. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is known to result in neurophysiological and neurocognitive changes that affect control of motor, linguistic, and cognitive functions. MDD's impact on these processes is reflected in an individual's communication via coupled mechanisms: vocal articulation, facial gesturing and choice of content to convey in a dialogue. In particular, MDD-induced neurophysiological changes are associated with a decline in dynamics and coordination of speech and facial motor control, while neurocognitive changes influence dialogue semantics. In this paper, biomarkers are derived from all of these modalities, drawing first from previously developed neurophysiologically-motivated speech and facial coordination and timing features. In addition, a novel indicator of lower vocal tract constriction in articulation is incorporated that relates to vocal projection. Semantic features are analyzed for subject avatar dialogue content using a sparse coded lexical embedding space, and for contextual clues related to the subject's present or past depression status. The features and depression classification system were developed for the 6th International Audio Video Emotion Challenge (AVEC), which provides data consisting of audio, video-based facial action units, and transcribed text of individuals communicating with the human-controlled avatar. A clinical Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) score and binary depression decision are provided for each participant. PHQ predictions were obtained by fusing outputs from a Gaussian staircase regressor for each feature set, with results on the development set of mean F1=0.81, RMSE=5.31, and MAE=3.34. These compare favorably to the challenge baseline development results of mean F1=0.73, RMSE=6.62, and MAE=5.52. On test set evaluation, our system obtained a mean F1=0.70, which is similar to the challenge baseline test result. Future work calls for consideration of joint feature analyses across modalities in an effort to detect neurological disorders based on the interplay of motor, linguistic, affective, and cognitive components of communication. Text classification methods have been evaluated on topic classification tasks. This thesis extends the empirical evaluation to emotion classification tasks in the literary domain. This study selects two literary text classification problems---the eroticism classification in Dickinson's poems and the sentimentalism classification in early American novels---as two cases for this evaluation. Both problems focus on identifying certain kinds of emotion---a document property other than topic. This study chooses two popular text classification algorithms---naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVM), and three feature engineering options---stemming, stopword removal and statistical feature selection (Odds Ratio and SVM)---as the subjects of evaluation. This study aims to examine the effects of the chosen classifiers and feature engineering options on the two emotion classification problems, and the interaction between the classifiers and the feature engineering options. This thesis seeks empirical answers to the following research questions: (1) is SVM a better classifier than naive Bayes regarding classification accuracy, new literary knowledge discovery and potential for example-based retrieval? (2) is SVM a better feature selection method than Odds Ratio regarding feature reduction rate and classification accuracy improvement? (3) does stop word removal affect the classification performance? (4) does stemming affect the performance of classifiers and feature selection methods? Some of our conclusions are consistent with what are obtained in topic classification, such as Odds Ratio does not improve SVM performance and stop word removal might harm classification. Some conclusions contradict previous results, such as SVM does not beat naive Bayes in both cases. Some findings are new to this area---SVM and naive Bayes select top features in different frequency ranges; stemming might harm feature selection methods. These experiment results provide new insights to the relation between classification methods, feature engineering options and non-topic document properties. They also provide guidance for classification method selection in literary text classification applications. Health surveillance systems based on online user-generated content often rely on the identification of textual markers that are related to a target disease. Given the high volume of available data, these systems benefit from an automatic feature selection process. This is accomplished either by applying statistical learning techniques, which do not consider the semantic relationship between the selected features and the inference task, or by developing labour-intensive text classifiers. In this paper, we use neural word embeddings, trained on social media content from Twitter, to determine, in an unsupervised manner, how strongly textual features are semantically linked to an underlying health concept. We then refine conventional feature selection methods by a priori operating on textual variables that are sufficiently close to a target concept. Our experiments focus on the supervised learning problem of estimating influenza-like illness rates from Google search queries. A "flu infection" concept is formulated and used to reduce spurious and potentially confounding features that were selected by previously applied approaches. In this way, we also address forms of scepticism regarding the appropriateness of the feature space, alleviating potential cases of overfitting. Ultimately, the proposed hybrid feature selection method creates a more reliable model that, according to our empirical analysis, improves the inference performance (Mean Absolute Error) of linear and nonlinear regressors by 12 and 28.7 , respectively. Online mental health forums provide users with an anonymous support platform that is facilitated by moderators responsible for finding and addressing critical posts, especially those related to self-harm. Given the seriousness of these posts, it is important that the moderators are able to locate these critical posts quickly in order to respond with timely support. We approached the task of automatically triaging forum posts as a multiclass classification problem. Our model uses a supervised classifier with various features including lexical, psycholinguistic, and topic modeling features. On a dataset of mental forum posts from ReachOut.com1, our approach identified critical cases with a F-score of over 80 , showing the effectiveness of the model. Among 16 participating teams and 60 total runs, our best run achieved macro-average F1-score of 41 for the critical categories (The best score among all the runs was 42 ). Objective Social media is becoming increasingly popular as a platform for sharing personal health-related information. This information can be utilized for public health monitoring tasks, particularly for pharmacovigilance, via the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques. However, the language in social media is highly informal, and user-expressed medical concepts are often nontechnical, descriptive, and challenging to extract. There has been limited progress in addressing these challenges, and thus far, advanced machine learning-based NLP techniques have been underutilized. Our objective is to design a machine learning-based approach to extract mentions of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from highly informal text in social media. @PARASPLIT Methods We introduce ADRMine, a machine learning-based concept extraction system that uses conditional random fields (CRFs). ADRMine utilizes a variety of features, including a novel feature for modeling words’ semantic similarities. The similarities are modeled by clustering words based on unsupervised, pretrained word representation vectors (embeddings) generated from unlabeled user posts in social media using a deep learning technique. @PARASPLIT Results ADRMine outperforms several strong baseline systems in the ADR extraction task by achieving an F -measure of 0.82. Feature analysis demonstrates that the proposed word cluster features significantly improve extraction performance. @PARASPLIT Conclusion It is possible to extract complex medical concepts, with relatively high performance, from informal, user-generated content. Our approach is particularly scalable, suitable for social media mining, as it relies on large volumes of unlabeled data, thus diminishing the need for large, annotated training data sets. While the volume of scholarly publications has increased at a frenetic pace, accessing and consuming the useful candidate papers, in very large digital libraries, is becoming an essential and challenging task for scholars. Unfortunately, because of language barrier, some scientists (especially the junior ones or graduate students who do not master other languages) cannot efficiently locate the publications hosted in a foreign language repository. In this study, we propose a novel solution, cross-language citation recommendation via Hierarchical Representation Learning on Heterogeneous Graph (HRLHG), to address this new problem. HRLHG can learn a representation function by mapping the publications, from multilingual repositories, to a low-dimensional joint embedding space from various kinds of vertexes and relations on a heterogeneous graph. By leveraging both global (task specific) plus local (task independent) information as well as a novel supervised hierarchical random walk algorithm, the proposed method can optimize the publication representations by maximizing the likelihood of locating the important cross-language neighborhoods on the graph. Experiment results show that the proposed method can not only outperform state-of-the-art baseline models, but also improve the interpretability of the representation model for cross-language citation recommendation task. Objective Build probabilistic topic model representations of hospital admissions processes and compare the ability of such models to predict clinical order patterns as compared to preconstructed order sets. @PARASPLIT Materials and Methods The authors evaluated the first 24 hours of structured electronic health record data for > 10 K inpatients. Drawing an analogy between structured items (e.g., clinical orders) to words in a text document, the authors performed latent Dirichlet allocation probabilistic topic modeling. These topic models use initial clinical information to predict clinical orders for a separate validation set of > 4 K patients. The authors evaluated these topic model-based predictions vs existing human-authored order sets by area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, precision, and recall for subsequent clinical orders. @PARASPLIT Results Existing order sets predict clinical orders used within 24 hours with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve 0.81, precision 16 , and recall 35 . This can be improved to 0.90, 24 , and 47 ( P < 10−20) by using probabilistic topic models to summarize clinical data into up to 32 topics. Many of these latent topics yield natural clinical interpretations (e.g., “critical care,” “pneumonia,” “neurologic evaluation”). @PARASPLIT Discussion Existing order sets tend to provide nonspecific, process-oriented aid, with usability limitations impairing more precise, patient-focused support. Algorithmic summarization has the potential to breach this usability barrier by automatically inferring patient context, but with potential tradeoffs in interpretability. @PARASPLIT Conclusion Probabilistic topic modeling provides an automated approach to detect thematic trends in patient care and generate decision support content. A potential use case finds related clinical orders for decision support. Background Existing risk adjustment models for intensive care unit (ICU) outcomes rely on manual abstraction of patient-level predictors from medical charts. Developing an automated method for abstracting these data from free text might reduce cost and data collection times. @PARASPLIT Objective To develop a support vector machine (SVM) classifier capable of identifying a range of procedures and diagnoses in ICU clinical notes for use in risk adjustment. @PARASPLIT Materials and methods We selected notes from 2001–2008 for 4191 neonatal ICU (NICU) and 2198 adult ICU patients from the MIMIC-II database from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Using these notes, we developed an implementation of the SVM classifier to identify procedures (mechanical ventilation and phototherapy in NICU notes) and diagnoses (jaundice in NICU and intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) in adult ICU). On the jaundice classification task, we also compared classifier performance using n-gram features to unigrams with application of a negation algorithm (NegEx). @PARASPLIT Results Our classifier accurately identified mechanical ventilation (accuracy=0.982, F1=0.954) and phototherapy use (accuracy=0.940, F1=0.912), as well as jaundice (accuracy=0.898, F1=0.884) and ICH diagnoses (accuracy=0.938, F1=0.943). Including bigram features improved performance on the jaundice (accuracy=0.898 vs 0.865) and ICH (0.938 vs 0.927) tasks, and outperformed NegEx-derived unigram features (accuracy=0.898 vs 0.863) on the jaundice task. @PARASPLIT Discussion Overall, a classifier using n-gram support vectors displayed excellent performance characteristics. The classifier generalizes to diverse patient populations, diagnoses, and procedures. @PARASPLIT Conclusions SVM-based classifiers can accurately identify procedure status and diagnoses among ICU patients, and including n-gram features improves performance, compared to existing methods. This issue of JAMIA focuses on natural language processing (NLP) techniques for clinical-text information extraction. Several articles are offshoots of the yearly ‘Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside’ (i2b2) (http: www.i2b2.org) NLP shared-task challenge, introduced by ( see page 552 )1 and co-sponsored by the Veteran's Administration for the last 2 years. This shared task follows long-running challenge evaluations in other fields, such as the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) for information extraction,2 TREC3 for text information retrieval, and CASP4 for protein structure prediction. Shared tasks in the clinical domain are recent and include annual i2b2 Challenges that began in 2006, a challenge for multi-label classification of radiology reports sponsored by Cincinnati Children's Hospital in 2007,5 a 2011 Cincinnati Children's Hospital challenge on suicide notes,6 and the 2011 TREC information retrieval shared task involving retrieval of clinical cases from narrative records.7 @PARASPLIT Although NLP research in the clinical domain has been active since the 1960s, progress in the development of NLP applications for clinical text has been slow and lags behind progress in the general NLP domain. There are several barriers to NLP development in the clinical domain, and shared tasks like the i2b2 VA Challenge address some of these barriers. Nevertheless, many barriers remain and unless the community takes a more active role in developing novel approaches for addressing the barriers, advancement and innovation will continue to be slow. @PARASPLIT Historically, there have been substantial barriers to NLP development in the clinical domain. These barriers are not unique to the clinical domain: they also occur in the fields of software engineering and general NLP. @PARASPLIT ### Lack of access to shared data @PARASPLIT Because of concerns regarding patient privacy and worry about revealing unfavorable institutional practices, hospitals and clinics have been extremely reluctant to allow access to clinical data for researchers from outside … @PARASPLIT Correspondence to Dr Wendy W Chapman, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, Bldg 2 #0728, La Jolla, California, USA; wwchapman at ucsd.edu Objective A system that translates narrative text in the medical domain into structured representation is in great demand. The system performs three sub-tasks: concept extraction, assertion classification, and relation identification. @PARASPLIT Design The overall system consists of five steps: (1) pre-processing sentences, (2) marking noun phrases (NPs) and adjective phrases (APs), (3) extracting concepts that use a dosage-unit dictionary to dynamically switch two models based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF), (4) classifying assertions based on voting of five classifiers, and (5) identifying relations using normalized sentences with a set of effective discriminating features. @PARASPLIT Measurements Macro-averaged and micro-averaged precision, recall and F-measure were used to evaluate results. @PARASPLIT Results The performance is competitive with the state-of-the-art systems with micro-averaged F-measure of 0.8489 for concept extraction, 0.9392 for assertion classification and 0.7326 for relation identification. @PARASPLIT Conclusions The system exploits an array of common features and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Prudent feature engineering sets the foundation of our systems. In concept extraction, we demonstrated that switching models, one of which is especially designed for telegraphic sentences, improved extraction of the treatment concept significantly. In assertion classification, a set of features derived from a rule-based classifier were proven to be effective for the classes such as conditional and possible. These classes would suffer from data scarcity in conventional machine-learning methods. In relation identification, we use two-staged architecture, the second of which applies pairwise classifiers to possible candidate classes. This architecture significantly improves performance. A critical aspect of malware forensics is authorship analysis. The successful outcome of such analysis is usually determined by the reverse engineer’s skills and by the volume and complexity of the code under analysis. To assist reverse engineers in such a tedious and error-prone task, it is desirable to develop reliable and automated tools for supporting the practice of malware authorship attribution. In a recent work, machine learning was used to rank and select syntax-based features such as n-grams and flow graphs. The experimental results showed that the top ranked features were unique for each author, which was regarded as an evidence that those features capture the author’s programming styles. In this paper, however, we show that the uniqueness of features does not necessarily correspond to authorship. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that many “unique” features selected using this method are clearly unrelated to the authors’ programming styles, for example, unique IDs or random but unique function names generated by the compiler; furthermore, the overall accuracy is generally unsatisfactory. Motivated by this discovery, we propose a layered Onion Approach for Binary Authorship Attribution called OBA2. The novelty of our approach lies in the three complementary layers: preprocessing, syntax-based attribution, and semantic-based attribution. Experiments show that our method produces results that not only are more accurate but have a meaningful connection to the authors’ styles. a 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of DFRWS. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http: creativecommons.org licenses by-nc-nd 3.0 ).