Data Augmentation for Mental Health Classification on Social Media

Abstract: The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user generated text on social media platforms. Academic re searchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain specific user generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional BERT, and Back Translation (BT) as the potential techniques for generating additional text to improve the performance of classifiers. Further, three different classifiers Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) are employed for analyzing the impact of data augmentation on two publicly available social media datasets. The experiments mental results show significant improvements in classifiers performance when trained on the augmented data.