Question: What sources are used to collect data relevant for BD?
Evidence: Previous work in computational linguistics and clinical psychology has tended to focus on the detection of mental health issues as classification tasks BIBREF44 . Datasets have been collected for various conditions including BD using publicly available social-media data from Twitter BIBREF45 and Reddit BIBREF46 , BIBREF47 . Unfortunately, the Twitter dataset is unavailable for further research. In both Reddit datasets, mental health-related content was deliberately removed. This allows the training of classifiers that try to predict the mental health of authors from excerpts that do not explicitly address mental health, yet it renders the data useless for analyses on how mental health is talked about online. Due to this lack of appropriate existing publicly accessible datasets, we will create such resources and make them available to subsequent researchers.
We plan to collect data relevant for BD in general as well as for personal recovery in BD from three sources varying in their available amount versus depth of the accounts we expect to find: 1) Twitter, 2) Reddit (focusing on mental health-related content unlike previous work), 3) blogs authored by affected individuals. Twitter and Reddit users with a BD diagnosis will be identified automatically via self-reported diagnosis statements, such as `I was diagnosed with BD-I last week'. To do so, we will extend on the diagnosis patterns and terms for BD provided by BIBREF47 . Implicit consent is assumed from users on these platforms to use their public tweets and posts. SECREF3 Relevant blogs will be manually identified, and their authors will be contacted to obtain informed consent for using their texts.
Since language and culture are important factors in our research questions, we need information on the language of the texts and the country of residence of their authors, which is not provided in a structured format in the three data sources. For language identification, Twitter employs an automatic tool BIBREF48 , which can be used to filter tweets according to 60 language codes, and there are free, fairly accurate tools such as the Google Compact Language Detector, which can be applied to Reddit and blog posts. The location of Twitter users can be automatically inferred from their tweets BIBREF49 or the (albeit noisy) location field in their user profiles BIBREF50 . Only one attempt to classify the location of Reddit users has been published so far BIBREF51 showing meagre results, indicating that the development of robust location classification approaches on this platform would constitute a valuable contribution. Some companies collect mental health-related online data and make them available to researchers subject to approval of their internal review boards, e.g., OurDataHelps by Qntfy or the peer-support forum provider 7 Cups. Unlike `raw' social media data, these datasets have richer user-provided metadata and explicit consent for research usage. On the other hand, less data is available, the process to obtain access might be tedious within the short timeline of a PhD project and it might be impossible to share the used portions of the data with other researchers. Therefore, we will follow up the possibilities of obtaining access to these datasets, but in parallel also collect our own datasets to avoid dependence on external data providers.
We plan to collect data relevant for BD in general as well as for personal recovery in BD from three sources varying in their available amount versus depth of the accounts we expect to find: 1) Twitter, 2) Reddit (focusing on mental healthrelated content unlike previous work), 3) blogs authored by affected individuals.
Answer: 1) Twitter, 2) Reddit (focusing on mental healthrelated content unlike previous work), 3) blogs authored by affected individuals.