Analyzing Reddit Data: Hybrid Model for Depression Sentiment using FastText Embedding

Abstract

Depression, a prevalent mental condition globally, exerts a substantial influence on various aspects of human cognition, emotions, and behaviour. The alarming increase in deaths attributable to depression over the past few years demonstrates the imperative need to address this problem through prevention and treatment interventions. In the era of thriving social media platforms, which have a significant impact on society and psychological aspects, these platforms have become a means for people to convey their emotions and experiences openly. Reddit stands out among these platforms as a significant place. The main aim of this study is to examine the feasibility of forecasting individuals' mental states by classifying Reddit articles on depression and non-depression. This work aims to employ deep learning algorithms and word embeddings to analyze the textual and semantic settings of narratives to detect symptoms of depression. The study effectively employed a BiLSTM-BiGRU model that applied FastText word embeddings. The BiLSTM-BiGRU model analyzes information bidirectionally, detecting correlations in sequential data. It's suitable for tasks dependent on input order or addressing data uncertainties. The Reddit dataset, featuring text concerning depression, achieved an accuracy score of 97.03% and an F1 score of 97.02%.