A mental state Knowledge–aware and Contrastive Network for early stress and depression detection on social media

Abstract

Stress and depression detection on social media aim at the analysis of stress and identification of depression tendency from social media posts, which provide assistance for the early detection of mental health conditions. Existing methods mainly model the mental states of the post speaker implicitly. They also lack the ability to mentalise for complex mental state reasoning. Besides, they are not designed to explicitly capture class-specific features. To resolve the above issues, we propose a mental state Knowledge–aware and Contrastive Network (KC-Net). In detail, we first extract mental state knowledge from a commonsense knowledge base COMET, and infuse the knowledge using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to explicitly model the mental states of the speaker. Then we propose a knowledge–aware mentalisation module based on dot-product attention to accordingly attend to the most relevant knowledge aspects. A supervised contrastive learning module is also utilised to fully leverage label information for capturing class-specific features. We test the proposed methods on a depression detection dataset Depression_Mixed with 3165 Reddit and blog posts, a stress detection dataset Dreaddit with 3553 Reddit posts, and a stress factors recognition dataset SAD with 6850 SMS-like messages. The experimental results show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all datasets: 95.4% of F1 scores on Depression_Mixed, 83.5% on Dreaddit and 77.8% on SAD, with 2.07% average improvement. Factor-specific analysis and ablation study prove the effectiveness of all proposed modules, while UMAP analysis and case study visualise their mechanisms. We believe our work facilitates detection and analysis of depression and stress on social media data, and shows potential for applications on other mental health conditions.