#suicidal - A multipronged approach to identify and explore suicidal ideation in twitter

Abstract

Technological advancements have led to the creation of social media platforms like Twitter, where people have started voicing their views over rarely discussed and socially stigmatizing issues. Twitter, is increasingly being used for studying psycho-linguistic phenomenon spanning from expressions of adverse drug reactions, depressions, to suicidality. In this work we focus on identifying suicidal posts from Twitter. Towards this objective we take a multipronged approach and implement different neural network models such as sequential models and graph convolutional networks, that are trained on textual content shared in Twitter, the historical tweeting activity of the users and social network formed between different users posting about suicidality. We train a stacked ensemble of classifiers representing different aspects of suicidal tweeting activity, and achieve state-of-the-art results on a new manually annotated dataset developed by us, that contains textual as well as network information of suicidal tweets. We further investigate into the trained models and perform qualitative analysis showing how historical tweeting activity and rich information embedded in the homophily networks amongst users in Twitter, aids in accurately identifying tweets expressing suicidal intent.