As defined in the free dictionary, depression refers to the act of depressing or state of being depressed. Depression is usually regarded as one type of mood disorder; the main clinical feature of depression is the significant and persistent mood depression. The depressed patients’ emotion can range from gloomy to grief, low self-esteem, and even to pessimism, which may cause suicidal attempts or behaviors [1]. The World Psychiatric Association set October 10 as the World Mental Health Day in 1992 to strengthen the awareness of the public on mental disorders. The latest report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that [2] there were approximately 322 million patients with depression in the world, and the prevalence rate was about 4.4%. The number of patients with depression is growing year by year. From 2005 to 2015, the number of patients with depression worldwide increased by 18.4%. According to the statistics of the WHO [2], depression is one of the 20 main reasons that can cause suicide in the world, accounting for about 1.5% of suicides. It also accounts for the highest proportion of disability among the global diseases and is the main factor of global nonfatal health loss.

With the development of the internet in people’s daily life, people began to share their feelings and problems on social media [3,4] such as Reddit and Twitter. The research of Park et al [5] showed that people with depression tend to post information about depression and even treatment on social media. Thus, we can get a lot of valuable information from social media. If we can judge whether a person has depression based on the information from the internet, it can help the doctors intervene early and avoid the happening of self-injury or suicide. Many researchers, coming from different disciplines such as computer science and psychology, have paid much attention on this topic. In addition, some advanced methods are proposed for depression detection. However, the detection accuracy still needs to be improved.

The goal of depression detection is to classify a person or a post as depressed or not. The performance of depression detection on social media can help with the clinical treatment of depression. This problem needs to be solved. The posts of patients with depression usually contain strong emotions. We give three examples of the textual posts left on Reddit, including two depression-indicative posts and one standard post as follows.

Examples 1 and 2 contain strong emotional information made by the patients with depression. From example 1, the words, including horrible, die, and stupid, express strong negative emotions of the author. The words hate and shitty in example 2 also express the author’s strong negative emotions. Example 3 shows the post of a regular user. It does not contain strong negative emotions. As previously mentioned, emotional semantic information usually provides us useful clues for depression detection.

We also counted the proportion of the positive words and the negative words that appeared in the depression-indicative posts and the standard posts of the Reddit data set [6], respectively. The statistical results are shown in Table 1. The percentage of positive emotion words in the table is calculated by . The percentage of negative emotion words was similar. In addition, we calculated the percentages of emotion words in the depression-indicative posts and the standard posts. The depressed users used more negative words than the nondepressed users. At the same time, they used less positive words in their posts than the nondepressed users. It can be concluded from the statistical results that the emotional semantic information may play an effective role for the depression detection task.

Detecting depression automatically has made some progress. Many existing models detect depression based on the feature engineering such as bag of words [7,8], latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) [9,10], N-gram [11], Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary [12], or their combinations [4,13,14]. Bag of words, LDA, and N-gram have been widely used in natural language processing (NLP) for feature extraction and have achieved great progress. LIWC can carry out quantitative analysis on the word categories (especially psychological words) of the text content, including the sentiment, emotion, and so on. Emotion extracted by LIWC is often used in the depression detection task. With the development of deep learning in NLP, more and more studies use deep learning models for depression detection. Orabi et al [15] proposed a method based on deep learning (convolutional neural network [CNN] and recurrent neural network [RNN]) to detect depression. Gui et al [16] proposed a reinforcement learning method based on RNN for depression detection. Although these advanced deep learning based models can extract higher-level semantic information and have achieved great progress, they still lack effective extraction of the emotional semantic information. This may limit the ability of their model because the emotional information may bring effective clues for depression detection, as shown in examples 1 and 2.

Before introducing our model and to understand our paper more conveniently, we give several definitions of concepts, including high-level emotional semantic information, semantic understanding network (SUN), emotion understanding network (EUN), and dynamic fusion strategy.

To extract the emotional information effectively, we propose an emotion-based attention network (EAN) for depression detection. Our EAN model mainly contains two modules, including a SUN and an EUN. The SUN module is used to capture the contextual semantic information, which has been widely used in NLP. The EUN module is used to capture the emotional information because the emotional information plays an important role for depression detection as previously mentioned. As shown in Table 1, the depression-indicative posts contained more negative words and less positive words, and the standard posts contained less negative words and more positive words. Thus, we designed the EUN module. The EUN module contains two units, including a positive emotion understanding unit and a negative emotion understanding unit, which are used to extract the positive emotional information and the negative emotional information, respectively. Apart from it, we also propose a dynamic fusion strategy in the EUN module to fuse the positive emotion information and the negative emotion information.

The main contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows:

In this section, we review the related work about depression detection on social media.

In recent years, with the development of social media, more and more people are willing to post their thoughts, emotions, or life details on social media, including Reddit, Twitter, and so on. Park et al [5] showed that people with depression tend to post information about depression and even treatment on social media. Thus, we can get a lot of valuable information from social media. More and more researchers began to analyze the mental health of the users based on the information from social media. As a result, depression detection based on social media has attracted a lot of attention.

De Choudhury et al [17] collected data from Twitter about the users with depression and the regular user, and combined the difference between their behavior on social media (depressed users manifested as decreased social activities, increased negative emotions and self-concern, a high degree and increased expression of religious thoughts, etc) and established a characteristic model for depression detection. Park et al [18] tested for users with depression through social media and conducted semistructured face-to-face interviews with 14 active users. The study concluded that users with depression regarded social media as a platform for social awareness and emotional sharing, while users with nondepression regarded social media as a platform for sharing information. Thus, emotional information is important in the task of detecting depression in social media.

Most of the existing methods for depression detection are based on feature engineering. LIWC is usually used to extract individual psychological states, such as positive and negative emotions, pronouns, and so on. Therefore, LIWC was often used for the depression detection task [4,12-14]. Kang et al [19] proposed a multimodal method for depression detection including text analysis, a word-based emoticon analysis, and a support vector machine–based image classifier. The authors applied visual sentiment ontology [20] and SentiStrength dictionaries to build a mood lexicon for emoticon analysis to enhance the results of depression detection. Shen et al [21] extracted six depression-related feature groups (including social network feature, user profile feature, visual feature, emotional feature, topic-level feature, and domain-specific feature) for depression detection. Hiraga [22] extracted linguistic features for depression detection, including character n-grams, token n-grams, and lemmas and selected lemmas. Hussain et al [3] developed an application called the Socially Mediated Patient Portal. The application could generate a series of features for depression detection.

Shneidman [23] presented depression that tended to be closely related to suicide. De Choudhury et al [24] analyzed Reddit users’ posts on the topic of mental health that later turned to the topic of suicidal thoughts. This turn could be predicted by traits such as self-focus, poor language style, reduced social engagement, and expressions of despair or anxiety. Yates et al [25] proposed a neural framework for depression detection, and they presented that self-harm was closely related to depression. The Conference and Labs of Evaluation Forum for Early Risk Prediction (CLEF eRISK) is a public competition about different areas such as health and safety [26]. CLEF eRISK 2018 is about the early detection of depression and anorexia [8,27]. CLEF eRISK 2019 is about the severity of symptoms of depression, self-injury, and anorexia [28].

Different from traditional feature engineering-based methods, deep learning methods mostly apply end-to-end models. Yates et al [25] proposed a neural framework based on a CNN for depression detection. Orabi et al [15] proposed a neural method based on a CNN and RNN for depression detection. Song et al [29] proposed a neural network that was named the feature attention network for depression detection. Gui et al [16] proposed a reinforcement learning method based on long short-term memory (LSTM) for depression detection. Ray et al [30] proposed a multilevel attention network to fuse the features from the multimodal for depression detection.

According to previous research on depression detection, it can be concluded that the emotional information is important in the task of depression detection. In addition, deep learning can take high-level semantic information into account, but the current deep learning methods for depression detection still lack effective extraction of the emotional semantic information. Thus, we propose a deep learning model to consider the high-level emotional information that is captured by the deep learning method for depression detection, which is named the EAN.

The structure of this paper is organized as follows. The Introduction section introduced the background and related work. The Methods section shows the details of the proposed model. The Results section gives the experiments in this paper. The Discussion section shows the conclusions and future work.

As a newly developed social media, Reddit has become a widely popular web-based discussion forum. Reddit users can discuss a variety of topics on this web-based platform anonymously. The topics discussed on the platform can be arranged in more than a million discussion groups. Due to the large amount of discussion text, Reddit attracts many researchers to conduct their studies with the data on the Reddit platform. Pirina and Çöltekin [6] built a data set for depression detection based on Reddit, which was named the Reddit data set. The samples in the Reddit data set [6] are collected from the Reddit platform. The Reddit data set [6] contains 1293 depression-indicative posts and 549 standard posts.

We preprocessed the Reddit data set, such as removing the stop words. We then counted the occurrence number of each word for the depression-indicative posts and the standard posts. We sorted the words according to the statistics and show the top of the word lists in Figure 1. We also counted the occurrence number of the positive emotion words and the negative emotion words for the depression-indicative posts and the standard posts. For all of the words, the positive emotion words and the negative emotion words with high frequency of occurrence are also shown in Textbox 1.

As shown in Textbox 1, from the most commonly used words of the depressed users, we can see many negatives words are also included in the most commonly used words such as depression or fucking. The most common words for nondepressed people are commonly used words in daily life. As can be seen from the list of negative words with high frequency of occurrence used by users with depression, the negative words used by users with depression are more intense than the negative words appearing in the posts of nondepressed users, such as suicide, die, kill, and hate.

In this section, we introduce the proposed model for depression detection briefly, which is called the EAN, as shown in Figure 1. The proposed EAN model mainly contains two parts, including a SUN and an EUN. The SUN module is used to capture the contextual semantic information in the depression-indicative posts. The EUN module is used to capture the emotional semantic information in the depression-indicative posts. Finally, we concatenated the features captured by the two parts and judged whether the text is depression-indicative or not by the depression detector. We give details on the SUN, the EUN, and the loss function next.

The SUN was used to capture the contextual semantic information in the text for depression detection. There are three layers in the SUN module, including the word encoding layer, context encoding layer, and attention mechanism (Att) layer. We will introduce these three layers in more details.

Many research papers [19-21] and their experiments have proven the effectiveness of emotional feature in depression detection tasks. Inspired by this, we considered the high-level emotional semantic information in the depression-indicative posts based on the EUN. The EUN was used to capture the emotional semantic information in the text for depression detection. There are three layers in the EUN module, including the input layer, emotion encoding layer, and emotion fusion layer. We introduce these three layers in more detail in the following sections.

As previously described, we get the contextual semantic information h_att from the SUN module and the emotional semantic information h_emo from the EUN module. In this section, we applied a concatenation operation to fuse the contextual semantic information h_att and the emotional semantic information h_emo as the final representation f_final:

Accordingly, the final classification decision for depression detection is formulated by the softmax function:

The cross-entropy loss was used for depression detection in our model. The training goal was to minimize the loss.

The unit size of Bi-LSTM in our experiments was 64. We applied the pretrained 300-dimension word embedding (GloVe) in the word encoding layer. In addition, the optimization function was Adam, and the batch size was 128. Following Tadesse et al [4], we also applied a 10-fold cross validation in our experiments; 90% of posts in the data sets were used as our training set, and the other 10% of posts were used as the testing set.

We applied the standard metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, to evaluate the effectiveness of our model for depression detection. F1 is defined as follows:

We compared the results of our model with many state-of-the-art methods on the Reddit data set. We compared it with the baselines, including LIWC, LDA, unigram, bigram, LIWC + LDA + unigram, LIWC + LDA + bigram [4], LSTM, Bi-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM + Att.

As shown in Table 2, the results based on deep learning are generally higher than the results based on feature engineering methods. It is because deep learning can capture the higher semantic information of texts. In addition, we can also get the following conclusions.

The results based on bigram (bigram and LIWC + LDA + bigram) were higher than unigram (unigram and LIWC + LDA + unigram). It can be concluded that contextual information can improve the results of the model. The results based on Bi-LSTM were higher than LSTM. it can be concluded that considering bidirectional contextual semantic information is necessary. The results based on Bi-LSTM + Att were higher than Bi-LSTM; it can be proven that the Att is effective for the depression detection task. The proposed EAN model got the higher results because we took into consideration both the contextual semantic information and the emotional semantic information.

In this section, we analyze the effectiveness of the two modules (SUN and EUN), the effectiveness of different emotional semantic information, and the effectiveness of the dynamic fusion strategy.

Depression attracts more and more attention from people and organizations now. With the development of computer technology, some researchers are trying to use computers to automatically identify people who are depressed. In this paper, we proposed an EAN model to explicitly extract the high-level emotion information for the depression detection task. The proposed EAN model consists of the SUN and the EUN. In the proposed model, we took into consideration the positive emotion information and the negative emotion information simultaneously. At the same time, we applied a dynamic fusion strategy to fuse the positive emotion information and the negative information. The experimental results verified that the emotional semantic information is effective in depression detection.

According to WHO statistics, depression is one of the main causes of suicide in the world. We will focus on the relationship between depression and suicide. We will try to combine suicide detection with depression detection in our future work to improve the performance of both tasks by multitask learning. In addition, the future work will be combined with self-reported depressive symptoms or clinical diagnosis. Hopefully, our study can provide some technical supports in the field of health care.