We focus on exploring various approaches of Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and their explainability for a challenging yet important supervised learning task notorious for training data scarcity, i.e. Depression Symptoms Detection (DSD) from text. We start with a comprehensive synthesis of different components of our ZSL modeling and analysis of our ground truth samples and Depression symptom clues curation process with the help of a practicing clinician. We next analyze the accuracy of various state-of-the-art ZSL models and their potential enhancements for our task. Further, we sketch a framework for the use of ZSL for hierarchical text-based explanation mechanism, which we call, Syntax Tree-Guided Semantic Explanation (STEP). Finally, we summarize experiments from which we conclude that we can use ZSL models and achieve reasonable accuracy and explainability, measured by a proposed Explainability Index (EI). This work is, to our knowledge, the first work to exhaustively explore the efficacy of ZSL models for DSD task, both in terms of accuracy and explainability.

We choose our basic emotions from a hybrid emotion model consisting of the common emotions from four highly regarded psychological models of emotions. Moreover, we augment that emotion model with new emotion categories because of their importance in the analysis of depression. Most of those additional emotions have not been used in previous emotion mining research. Our experimental analyses show that a cost sensitive RankSVM algorithm and a Deep Learning model are both robust, measured by both Macro F-measures and Micro F-measures. This suggests that these algorithms are superior in addressing the widely known data imbalance problem in multi-label learning. Moreover, our application of Deep Learning performs the best, giving it an edge in modeling deep semantic features of our extended emotional categories.

A new machine learning model can detect early signs of depression in written text like Twitter posts, according to a study by University of Alberta computing scientists. "The outcome of our study is that we can build useful predictive models that can accurately identify depressive language," said graduate student Nawshad Farruque, who designed the model to identify linguistic clues in everyday communication. "While we are using the model to identify depressive language on Twitter, (it) can be easily applied to text from other domains for detecting depression." The English-language model was developed using samples of writing by individuals who identify as depressed on online depression forums. The machine learning algorithm was then trained to identify depressive language in tweets.

A new technology using artificial intelligence detects depressive language in social media posts more accurately than current systems and uses less data to do it. The technology, which was presented during the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, is the first of its kind to show that, to more accurately detect depressive language, small, high-quality data sets can be applied to deep learning, a commonly used AI approach that is typically data intensive. Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that the words we use in interaction with others on a daily basis are a good indicator of our mental and emotional state. Past attempts to apply deep learning techniques to detect and monitor depression in social media posts have been shown to be tedious and expensive, explained Nawshad Farruque, a University of Alberta Ph.D. student in computing science who is leading the new study. He explained that a Twitter post saying that somebody is depressed because Netflix is down isn't really expressing depression, so someone would need to "explain" this to the algorithm.

A new technology using artificial intelligence detects depressive language in social media posts more accurately than current systems and uses less data to do it. The technology, which was presented during the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, is the first of its kind to show that, to more accurately detect depressive language, small, high-quality data sets can be applied to deep learning, a commonly used AI approach that is typically data intensive. Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that the words we use in interaction with others on a daily basis are a good indicator of our mental and emotional state. Past attempts to apply deep learning techniques to detect and monitor depression in social media posts have been shown to be tedious and expensive, explained Nawshad Farruque, a University of Alberta PhD student in computing science who is leading the new study. He explained that a Twitter post saying that somebody is depressed because Netflix is down isn't really expressing depression, so someone would need to "explain" this to the algorithm.