Multi-task learning on mental disorder detection, sentiment detection, and emotion detection

Suicidal behavior is a global cause of life-threatening injury and most of the time, death. Mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar are prevalent among the youth in recent decades. Social media are popular platforms for individuals to post their thoughts and feelings on. Extracting people's sentiments and feelings from such online platforms would help detect mental disorders of the users to treat them before it becomes too late. This thesis investigates the use of multi-task learning systems and single-task learning techniques to estimate behaviors and mental states for early diagnosis. I used data mined from Reddit, one of the popular social media platforms that provides anonymity. Anonymity increases the chances of individuals sharing what they truly feel in their real life. The obtained results by the proposed approaches open new doors to the understanding of how multi-task systems can increase the performance of text classification problems such as depression detection, emotion detection, and sentiment analysis, trained together in a multi-task learning network when compared to their training in isolation in a single-task learning network. We used the SWMH dataset, already labeled by 5 different depression labels (depression, anxiety, suicide, bipolar, and off my chest) and then added emotion and polarity labels to it and made it publicly available for researchers in the literature. The obtained results in this study are also comparable to other approaches in the field.