Moderator Assistant: helping those who help via online mental health support groups

Abstract

Helping participants of online communities thrive, support their pro-social behaviours and duty-of-care are challenging tasks. This is particularly difficult in the online peer support groups that are becoming increasingly popular on social networks like Facebook or organizations like ReachOut.com in Australia. In this paper, we present a novel system called Moderator Assistant, that uses natural language processing techniques to provide automated support for multiple online support groups. The system generates automated interventions based on key-terms and concepts extracted from the text posted by participants. The human moderator can select and edit these interventions before sending to a participant. The system implements behaviour analysis features to measure the impact of the interventions.