What Does Your Bio Say? Inferring Twitter Users’ Depression Status From Multimodal Profile Information Using Deep Learning

Abstract

People suffering from stress and various mental health problems find it easier to express and share their feelings on online platforms, such as Twitter. However, the imposed character limit (280 characters) by Twitter and infrequent online activities of a section of users poses a serious setback in using computational methods for mental health analysis or emotion research. Twitter provides rich metadata information about its users (such as user’s description, geolocation, and profile image URL), which can provide valuable information regarding the mental state of the users. We hypothesize that Twitter’s rich metadata information about their users can provide some valuable depression cues, which may help in an early low-profile evaluation. In this article, we investigate this hypothesis by developing an end-to-end multimodal multitask (MT) system for depression detection (primary task) and emotion recognition (auxiliary task), where the variation of emotion information based on different user descriptions assists the learning of the primary task. The proposed system attains 70% accuracy on the depression detection task outperforming several single-task (ST) baselines built on the various combination of input features. Our findings indicate that Twitters’s rich metadata information can be leveraged to detect depression among users with significant confidence.