SSN@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Transfer Learning using BERT for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Texts

AbstractDepression is one of the most common mentalissues faced by people. Detecting signs ofdepression early on can help in the treatmentand prevention of extreme outcomes like suicide. Since the advent of the internet, peoplehave felt more comfortable discussing topicslike depression online due to the anonymityit provides. This shared task has used datascraped from various social media sites andaims to develop models that detect signs andthe severity of depression effectively. In thispaper, we employ transfer learning by applyingenhanced BERT model trained for Wikipediadataset to the social media text and performtext classification. The model gives a F1-scoreof 63.8% which was reasonably better than theother competing models.