Model can more naturally detect depression in conversations

a post by Rob Matheson for the Big Think blog

Neural network learns speech patterns that predict depression in clinical interviews

To diagnose depression, clinicians interview patients, asking specific questions — about, say, past mental illnesses, lifestyle, and mood — and identify the condition based on the patient’s responses.

In recent years, machine learning has been championed as a useful aid for diagnostics. Machine-learning models, for instance, have been developed that can detect words and intonations of speech that may indicate depression. But these models tend to predict that a person is depressed or not, based on the person’s specific answers to specific questions. These methods are accurate, but their reliance on the type of question being asked limits how and where they can be used.

In a paper being presented at the Interspeech conference, MIT researchers detail a neural-network model that can be unleashed on raw text and audio data from interviews to discover speech patterns indicative of depression. Given a new subject, it can accurately predict if the individual is depressed, without needing any other information about the questions and answers.

The researchers hope this method can be used to develop tools to detect signs of depression in natural conversation. In the future, the model could, for instance, power mobile apps that monitor a user’s text and voice for mental distress and send alerts. This could be especially useful for those who can’t get to a clinician for an initial diagnosis, due to distance, cost, or a lack of awareness that something may be wrong.

“The first hints we have that a person is happy, excited, sad, or has some serious cognitive condition, such as depression, is through their speech,” says first author Tuka Alhanai, a researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “If you want to deploy [depression-detection] models in scalable way … you want to minimize the amount of constraints you have on the data you’re using. You want to deploy it in any regular conversation and have the model pick up, from the natural interaction, the state of the individual.”

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I found this particularly interesting since I have recently had two phone assessments and the second one was to query the answers that I had put on the standard questionnaire. That one that asks how many days in the last two weeks have you ... ?
I find that particularly difficult. Did I feel miserable all day just once, did I feel miserable and unable to cope for part of every day etc?

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