Momentary Depressive Feeling Detection Using X (Formerly Twitter) Data: Contextual Language Approach

Background: Depression and momentary depressive feelings are major public health concerns imposing a substantial burden on both individuals and society. Early detection of momentary depressive feelings is highly beneficial in reducing this burden and improving the quality of life for affected individuals. To this end, the abundance of data exemplified by X (formerly Twitter) presents an invaluable resource for discerning insights into individuals’ mental states and enabling timely detection of these transitory depressive feelings. Objective: The objective of this study was to automate the detection of momentary depressive feelings in posts using contextual language approaches. Methods: First, we identified terms expressing momentary depressive feelings and depression, scaled their relevance to depression, and constructed a lexicon. Then, we scraped posts using this lexicon and labeled them manually. Finally, we assessed the performance of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers (BERT), A Lite BERT (ALBERT), Robustly Optimized BERT Approach (RoBERTa), Distilled BERT (DistilBERT), convolutional neural network (CNN), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), and machine learning (ML) algorithms in detecting momentary depressive feelings in posts. Results: This study demonstrates a notable distinction in performance between binary classification, aimed at identifying posts conveying depressive sentiments and multilabel classification, designed to categorize such posts across multiple emotional nuances. Specifically, binary classification emerges as the more adept approach in this context, outperforming multilabel classification. This outcome stems from several critical factors that underscore the nuanced nature of depressive expressions within social media. Our results show that when using binary classification, BERT and DistilBERT (pretrained transfer learning algorithms) may outperform traditional ML algorithms. Particularly, DistilBERT achieved the best performance in terms of area under the curve (96.71%), accuracy (97.4%), sensitivity (97.57%), specificity (97.22%), precision (97.30%), and F 1 -score (97.44%). DistilBERT obtained an area under the curve nearly 12% points higher than that of the best-performing traditional ML algorithm, convolutional neural network. This study showed that transfer learning algorithms are highly effective in extracting knowledge from posts, detecting momentary depressive feelings, and highlighting their superiority in contextual analysis. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that contextual language approaches—particularly those rooted in transfer learning—are reliable approaches to automate the early detection of momentary depressive feelings and can be used to develop social media monitoring tools for identifying individuals who may be at risk of depression. The implications are far-reaching because these approaches stand poised to inform the creation of social media monitoring tools and are pivotal for identifying individuals susceptible to depression. By intervening proactively, these tools possess the potential to slow the progression of depressive feelings, effectively mitigating the societal load of depression and fostering improved mental health. In addition to highlighting the capabilities of automated sentiment analysis, this study illuminates its pivotal role in advancing global public health.