Utilizing Temporal Psycholinguistic Cues

for Suicidal Intent Estimation

Puneet Mathur1(B) , Ramit Sawhney2 , Shivang Chopra3 , Maitree Leekha3 ,

and Rajiv Ratn Shah4
1
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
[email protected]
2
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
3
Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India
4
MIDAS Labs, IIIT Delhi, New Delhi, India

Abstract. Temporal psycholinguistics can play a crucial role in study-

ing expressions of suicidal intent on social media. Current methods are
limited in their approach in leveraging contextual psychological cues
from online user communities. This work embarks in a novel direction
to explore historical activities of users and homophily networks formed
between Twitter users for extracting suicidality trends. Empirical evi-
dence proves the advantages of incorporating historical user profiling
and temporal graph convolutional modeling for automated detection of
suicidal connotations on Twitter.

1 Introduction
Suicidal ideation detection is a well studied problem in social media analysis. Var-
ious works have tried to identify linguistic patterns correlated with suicidality
intent. Despite the sustained efforts from the community, most approaches ignore
the psychological relevance of temporal characteristics of suicidal behaviour.
Moreover, there has been limited explorations in the space of homophily net-
works to identify collusive depressive users. We hypothesize that the contextual
information embedded in social media engagement and historical activities of
users can lead to substantial improvements in automated identification of sui-
cidal ideation. We look beyond linguistic cues into temporal signals throughout
this work, with the help of a publicly available dataset given by [14] of 34,306
tweets on suicidality detection.

2 Related Work
2.1 Challenges on Social Media
The growth of social media websites hosts a number of challenges such as
cyberbullying, suicide pacts, and radicalism that motivate suicidal behavior and
P. Mathur and R. Sawhney—Equal contribution
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
J. M. Jose et al. (Eds.): ECIR 2020, LNCS 12036, pp. 265–271, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_33
266 P. Mathur et al.

impact the mental health of the users [10]. The associativity of suicide-related
verbalizations on social media websites has been found to be strongly related to
potential suicidal attempts. Prior studies show how suicidal intent declarations
were significantly more assortative than chance, at times connected till 6 degrees
of separation [5]. A patient’s social media profile can help medical experts gain
perspective into their mental health status and identify those at critical risk for
suicide attempts [15]. The potential of technological interventions for suicidal
risk assessment and mitigation needs to be explored in detail.

2.2 Text-Based Approaches

Various works have been recently proposed with an objective of automating
the detection of social media posts expressing suicide ideation using textual
information [3,7,17]. [4] performed a semi-automated content-based analysis on a
small number of tweets related to depression in order to derive certain qualitative
insights into the behavior of users displaying suicidal behavior. Self-disclosure
helps to facilitate psychological well being in individuals with mental illness [2].
Textual descriptions of social media disclosures have been extensively studied in
the past [7]. [19] explored deep learning based supervised classifiers for suicidal
ideation detection.

2.3 Psycho-Linguistic Analysis

[13] used social graph based features and gained considerable improvement in
the task of abuse detection. [16] performed a psycho-linguistic analysis of online
users for a similar task. [1] tried to link users’ psychological features such as
personality traits including personalities, sentiment and emotion for cyberbulling
and trolling. The contributions that we make in this work are different from
previous efforts as there has been hardly any attempt to take a combined multi-
faceted approach for solving the task of suicidal ideation in Twitter.

2.4 Signals from Temporal Data

Temporal graphs can capture the relationships in data with time so as to model
new events and comparison to related entities and historical states [18]. [9]
detected groups based on interesting features of the time-evolving networks.
It studied several clustering frameworks for time-evolving networks for detecting
group structure. [6] performed temporal sentiment analysis for early detection
of cyberbulling and suicide ideation of a user through graph-based data mining
approaches.

3 Methodology
The proposed methodology looks beyond text classifiers and leverages tweeting
history of users as well as their social network communication patterns. User-
based features were extracted from the historical tweeting activity and inter-user
 Utilizing Temporal Psycholinguistic Cues for Suicidal Intent Estimation 267

interactions was modeled as a social graph. The methodology is two-fold con-

sisting of historical signal modeling and temporal graph convolutional modeling.

3.1 Classification Network

In order to learn from the textual information available in the raw tweets, we
trained a BLSTM + Attention network [20]. We train a BLSTM model with
100 LSTM units, dropout rate of 0.25 and a recurrent dropout rate of 0.2. The
attention layer was followed by another dropout layer of 0.2. This was followed
by two dense layers having 256 units and 2 units, respectively.

3.2 Temporal Modeling of Suicidal Tendency

Motivation: The idea of temporal modeling of suicidal tendencies is inspired by

[11] with additions. According to [11], a representation for the historical activity
can be formulated as a temporal weighting scheme φi which is a sum of two
independent time varying functions of suicidality - ideation build-up λi (t) and
sinusoidal episodes μi (t). Extrapolating from this, we add a third independent
time-varying function - white Gaussian noise zi (t). Let Δti be the time offset
from the original tweet and the temporal representation function z be given by
Eq. 1.

z(u, H) = φi (Δt)f (hi ) (1)
hi ∈H

Suicidal Ideation Build-Up: Each user’s historical tweets can be modeled

as an exponential function in time given by Eq. 2 where α and β are hyper
parameters tuned over training data.

λi (Δt) = αeβΔti (2)

Suicidal Episodes: Phased changes in suicidal intent are mathematically rep-
resented by Eq. 3. As per [12], the hyper parameters for the same are given by
Table 1.
Q
 2πqΔti 2πqΔti
μi (Δt) = (aq cos( ) + bq sin( )) (3)
1
U U

Table 1. Hyper parameters for Eq. 3 [11]

Hyperparameters Value
Q 3
U {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
aq , b q ≈ η(0, σ 2 )
268 P. Mathur et al.

Temporal Surprise: Similar to any channel medium, social media platforms

are prone to noise that adds randomness to the temporal suicidal patterns. The
white Gaussian noise is modeled as being derived from a normal distribution
with the expectation value of the noise term ζ( t) equal to 1.

φi (Δt) = λi (Δ(t) + μi (Δt) + ζi (Δt) (4)

For each of the tweet samples, the historical activity representation was an input
to logistic regression model to learn temporal embeddings from these features
which was used as an input to the final model.

3.3 Graph Convolutional Networks for User Profiling

Learning user representations can be significantly enriched by leveraging infor-

mation derived from the inter-user interactions in social media channels. For
this purpose, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) [8] can be effectively uti-
lized that are capable of modeling social interactions in the form of features of
nodes in the graph and allow contextual learning of information with respect to
a node’s neighbourhood.
Temporal GCN: We tried to incorporate the historical views into the extended
graph by constructing time weighted TF-IDF vectors of the historical tweets.
The author nodes were modified to consist of temporal weighting of TF-IDF
representation of tweets. Let the TF-IDF vector fkt of tweet at timestamp t for
k th author be defined by Eq. 5, where Ck is the global noise parameter,  controls
the margin of influence of a user on its neighbours social activity and ω is the
rate of decay of the suicidal sentiment. The external parameters Ck , k and ωk
are learnt from the training portion of the dataset in an unsupervised fashion.

f t = k expωk Δt (5)

4 Experiments

4.1 Data Description and Setup

To gauge the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we use the dataset from
SNAP-BATNET [14] which consists of 34, 306 tweets with 3, 984 of them suicidal
ideations. For each of these users, the tweet timelines were also collected to cre-
ate the set of historical tweets. 10-fold stratified cross-validation was employed
to evaluate models on each of the 10 train-val splits. The hyper parameters
for the temporal weighted combination were tuned using a grid search over the
grid α = {0.1, 0.5, 1.0}, β = {0, 0.01, 0.1, 1}, U = {1, 2..., 7} yielding α = 0.5,
β = 1, U = 7. t0 was assigned to time series points with values equal to
argmax(|μ|)i .
 Utilizing Temporal Psycholinguistic Cues for Suicidal Intent Estimation 269

Table 2. Performance analysis

Model F1 P R
SNAP-BATNET [14] 92.60 72.20 93.52
BiLSTM + Attention (Text) [11] 91.26 70.02 91.23
Text + Temporal Modeling 92.75* 91.98* 93.70*
Temporal GCN 93.89* 88.73 94.54*

Fig. 1. Analysis of historical behaviour of users in a community over time

5 Results and Ablation Analysis

The ablation study of experimented features presented in Table 2 highlights

the significance of temporal features extracted from social media in suicide
ideation risk assessment. Temporal GCN provides a substantial gain over text in
270 P. Mathur et al.

prediction confidence due to the user interactions. Additionally, it is interesting

to observe the ability of the GCN model to better represent historical suici-
dal signals in comparison to naive historical and textual features to a sufficient
degree. Empirically, temporal features help suppress false positives induced by
text classifiers that try to overfit on the presence of anecdotal suicidal phrases
such as “kill me...hahaha !! ” that may be considered as noise in non-suicidal
text. The most optimal weights for temporal signal modeling Text + Builtup
+ Episodic + Surprise were derived to be 0.52, 0.04, 0.04 and 0.32 through
cross-validation experiments.
Figure 1 elucidates the impact of including psychological contextual cues on
a small sample of connected users from the test dataset. It is evident from the
historic trends of Users B and C that they follow a nearly episodic nature with
scattered surprises. Analysing the trend plots for Users A and D reveals an
inverse build-up thereby demonstrating that there can be either a positive or
negative build-up in the suicidal intent of users. All these aspects when cap-
tured by our model has led to a statistically significant increase in the model’s
performance.

6 Conclusion

In spite of high importance of suicidal ideation identification on social media,

little research has focused on looking beyond linguistic patterns. Through our
work, we demonstrate that user interactions and past user behaviour are strong
indicators of a potentially concerning mental state of online users. In this study,
employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we address this gap by
investigating the impact of augmenting text based suicidal ideation detection
models with contextual cues based on historical tweeting behavior and social
media engagement.

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