Using Contextual Representations for Suicide Risk Assessment from Internet Forums
Social media posts may yield clues to the subject{'}s (usually, the writer{'}s) suicide risk and intent, which can be used for timely intervention. This research, motivated by the CLPsych 2019 shared task, developed neural network-based methods for analyzing posts in one or more Reddit forums to assess the subject{'}s suicide risk. One of the technical challenges this task poses is the large amount of text from multiple posts of a single user. Our neural network models use the advanced multi-headed Attention-based autoencoder architecture, called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Our system achieved the 2nd best performance of 0.477 macro averaged F measure on Task A of the challenge. Among the three different alternatives we developed for the challenge, the single BERT model that processed all of a user{'}s posts performed the best on all three Tasks.
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