NLP To Identify Impact Of Pandemic On People's Mental Health

A recent study published by the researchers at MIT and Harvard University used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to monitor the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on people's mental health. Collating Reddit posts of more than 800,000 users from 2018 to 2020, the researchers used various NLP techniques like trend analysis, supervised learning and unsupervised learning to characterise changes in the language used by mental health support groups. The study performed classification among mental health subreddits (forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit) as well as non-mental health subreddits and identified important features that help understand how each mental health problem may manifest in language. The trend analysis monitored COVID-19 related tokens (words, characters, or subwords) across subreddits and language features from January to April, to observe patterns. The researchers measured "how much the posts were about COVID-19" compared to the total number of words.