A self-attention TCN-based model for suicidal ideation detection from social media posts

Abstract

Early suicidal ideation detection has long been regarded as an important task that can benefit both society and individuals. In this regard, it has been shown that, very frequently, the first symptoms of this problem can be identified by analyzing the contents shared on social media. Machine learning classification models have proven promising in capturing behavioral and textual features from posts shared on social media. This study proposes a novel machine-learning model to detect the risk of suicide from social media posts, employing both natural language processing and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. We propose an ensemble LSTM-TCN model that benefits from a self-attention mechanism to detect suicidal ideation among users of two well-known social networks, Twitter (X) and Reddit. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive analysis of the data, examining the suicidal posts both statistically and semantically, which can provide rich knowledge about suicidal ideation. Our proposed model (AL-BTCN) outperforms the compared state-of-the-art models, resulting in over 94% accuracy, recall, and F1-score. Researchers, mental health specialists, and social media service providers can all benefit from the findings of this study.