Proactive screening for depression through metaphorical and automatic text analysis

  • Authors:
  • Yair Neuman;Yohai Cohen;Dan Assaf;Gabbi Kedma

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel;Gilasio Coding, Tel-Aviv, Israel;Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel;Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Objective: Proactive and automatic screening for depression is a challenge facing the public health system. This paper describes a system for addressing the above challenge. Materials and method: The system implementing the methodology -Pedesis - harvests the Web for metaphorical relations in which depression is embedded and extracts the relevant conceptual domains describing it. This information is used by human experts for the construction of a ''depression lexicon''. The lexicon is used to automatically evaluate the level of depression in texts or whether the text is dealing with depression as a topic. Results: Tested on three corpora of questions addressed to a mental health site the system provides 9% improvement in prediction whether the question is dealing with depression. Tested on a corpus of Blogs, the system provides 84.2% correct classification rate (p