基于深度神经网络的社交媒体用户级心理压力检测

User-Level Psychological Stress Detection from Social Media Using Deep Neural Network
基于深度神经网络的社交媒体用户级心理压力检测

ABSTRACT
It is of significant importance to detect and manage stress before it turns into severe problems. However, existing stress detection methods usually rely on psychological scales or physiological devices, making the detection complicated and costly. In this paper, we explore to automatically detect individuals’ psychological stress via social media. Employing real online micro-blog data, we first investigate the correlations between users’ stress and their tweeting content, social engagement and behavior patterns. Then we define two types of stress-related attributes: 1) low-level content attributes from a single tweet, including text, images and social interactions; 2) user-scope statistical attributes through their weekly micro-blog postings, leveraging information of tweeting time, tweeting types and linguistic styles. To combine content attributes with statistical attributes, we further design a convolutional neural network (CNN) with cross autoencoders to generate user-scope content attributes from low-level content attributes. Finally, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) model to incorporate the two types of userscope attributes to detect users’ psychological stress. We test the trained model on four different datasets from major micro-blog platforms including Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and Twitter. Experimental results show that the proposed model is effective and efficient on detecting psychological stress from micro-blog data. We believe our model would be useful in developing stress detection tools for mental health agencies and individuals.
在压力变成严重问题之前，检测和管理压力具有重要意义。然而，现有的压力检测方法通常依赖于心理量表或生理装置，使得检测复杂且成本高昂。在本文中，我们探索通过社交媒体自动检测个人的心理压力。利用真实的在线微博数据，我们首先调查了用户压力与其推特内容、社交参与度和行为模式之间的相关性。然后，我们定义了两种与压力相关的属性：1）来自单个推特的低级内容属性，包括文本、图像和社交互动；2） 用户范围统计属性通过他们每周的微博帖子，利用推特时间、推特类型和语言风格的信息。为了将内容属性与统计属性相结合，我们进一步设计了一个带有交叉自动编码器的卷积神经网络（CNN），以从低级内容属性生成用户范围的内容属性。最后，我们提出了一个深度神经网络（DNN）模型，将两种类型的用户范围属性结合起来，以检测用户的心理压力。我们在新浪微博、腾讯微博和推特等主要微博平台的四个不同数据集上测试了训练后的模型。实验结果表明，该模型能够有效地检测微博数据中的心理压力。我们相信，我们的模型将有助于为心理健康机构和个人开发压力检测工具。

Keywords
Stress detection; convolutional neural network; cross auto encoders; deep learning; micro-blog; social media
应力检测；卷积神经网络；交叉自动编码器；深度学习；微博；社会化媒体

1. INTRODUCTION
   1.1 Motivation
   Psychological stress is the root cause to many health problems and mental diseases. Chronic stress increases the risk of developing health problems such as insomnia, obesity, heart diseases, cancer etc. [1]. Many studies have revealed a link between stress and mental diseases like anxiety disorders, depression etc. [2]. Stress has been a threat to human health for a long time. Time magazine’s June 6, 1983 cover story called stress “The Epidemic of the Eighties” and referred to it as our leading health problem (http://www.stress.org/americas-1-healthproblem/). Meanwhile, stress has been progressively worsened and spread recent years. With the rapid development of modern society, many people feel increasingly stressed under the rapid pace of life. Numerous surveys have confirmed that adult Americans are feeling under much more stress than a decade or two ago. A 1996 Prevention magazine survey found that almost 75% feel they have “great stress” one day a week and with more than 30% indicating they feel this way more than twice a week, which is 55% compared to the same survey conducted in 1983 (http://www.anxietycentre.com/stress.shtml). In a word, the rapid increase of stress has become a great challenge to human health and life quality.

Psychological stress detection remains a large problem at the present stage. Detecting and managing stress before it turns into severe problems is of significant importance. Recent decades, many efforts have been devoted to stress detection by researchers from diverse areas. They have developed many methods to measure psychological stress, including psychological questionnaire based interviews [3, 4] and physiological signal based measures [5, 6]. However, these methods have their limitations in many aspects. Psychological questionnaires often contain a range of questions designed by psychologists. People are usually unwilling to do these questionnaires unless they have to. Physiological methods usually require professional devices to measure users’ physiological and biochemical properties and need specialists to analyze the acquired data. Thus, it is very important and useful to find a way to detect user’s stress state reliably, automatically and non-invasively.

With the fast development of social networks, people are widely using social media platforms to share their thoughts and feelings. A statistic report from statisticbrain.com (http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/) shows that by 2014.1.1, the total number of active registered users on Twitter has reached more than 645 million, with an average 58 million tweets posted per day. As for Sina weibo (the largest micro-blog platform in China), the number of weibo users has reached more than 600 million (http://www.comsoc.org/blog?page=3). People post tweets containing text and images on micro-blog platforms to share opinions, express emotions, record daily routines and communicate with friends. We can obtain linguistic and visual content that may indicate stress related symptoms. This makes the detection of users’ psychological stress through their tweets and posting patterns from micro-blog feasible.
1、引言
1.1动机
心理压力是许多健康问题和精神疾病的根源。慢性压力会增加患失眠、肥胖、心脏病、癌症等健康问题的风险[1]。许多研究揭示了压力与焦虑症、抑郁症等精神疾病之间的联系[2]。长期以来，压力一直威胁着人类健康。《时代》杂志1983年6月6日的封面故事将压力称为“80年代的流行病”，并将其称为我们的主要健康问题(http://www.stress.org/americas-1-health问题/）。与此同时，近年来压力逐渐恶化和蔓延。随着现代社会的快速发展，许多人在快速的生活节奏下感到越来越紧张。许多调查证实，美国成年人的压力比十年或二十年前大得多。1996年《预防》杂志的一项调查发现，近75%的人每周有一天感到“压力很大”，超过30%的人表示他们每周有两次以上有这种感觉，与1983年的调查相比，这一数字为55%(http://www.anxietycentre.com/stress.shtml). 总之，压力的快速增加已经成为对人类健康和生活质量的巨大挑战。
心理压力检测在现阶段仍然是一个大问题。在压力演变为严重问题之前检测和管理压力具有重要意义。近几十年来，来自不同领域的研究人员致力于压力检测。他们开发了许多测量心理压力的方法，包括基于心理问卷的访谈[3，4]和基于生理信号的测量[5，6]。然而，这些方法在许多方面都有其局限性。心理问卷通常包含心理学家设计的一系列问题。除非必须，否则人们通常不愿意做这些问卷调查。生理学方法通常需要专业设备来测量用户的生理和生化特性，并需要专家来分析获得的数据。因此，寻找一种可靠、自动和非侵入性地检测用户压力状态的方法是非常重要和有用的。
随着社交网络的快速发展，人们广泛使用社交媒体平台来分享自己的想法和感受。来自statisticbrain的统计报告(http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/)数据显示，截至2014年1月1日，推特上的活跃注册用户总数已超过6.45亿，平均每天发布5800万条推特。至于新浪微博（中国最大的微博平台），微博用户已经超过6亿(http://www.comsoc.org/blog?page=3). 人们在微博平台上发布包含文字和图像的推特，以分享意见、表达情感、记录日常生活并与朋友交流。我们可以获得可能指示压力相关症状的语言和视觉内容。这使得通过用户的推特和微博发布模式检测用户的心理压力成为可能。

1.2 Related Work
Existing methods for stress detection. Many efforts have been devoted to developing convenient tools for individual stress detection recent years. Researchers are trying to leverage pervasive devices like personal computers and mobile phones for routine stress detection. Hong L. etc. [7] proposed StressSense to unobtrusively recognize stress from human voice using smartphones. Paredes, P. etc. [8] investigated the initial lab evidence of the use of a computer mouse in the detection of stress. However, such applications rely on collecting one’s real-life data, which is easy to trigger antipathy. It makes stress detection invasive to normal life, and can’t be used widely in more people.

Researches on using social media for healthcare. With the rapid spread of social networks, researches on using social media data for physical and mental healthcare are also increasingly growing. Sadilek et al. [9] leverage Tweeter postings to identify the spread of flu symptoms. Paul M.J. etc. [10] apply the Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over 1.5 million health related tweets and discover correlations between behavioral risk factors and aliments. Munmun etc. [11] leverage behavioral cues indicated from Twitter postings to predict depression before it is reported. These studies show the feasibility of harnessing social media data for developing healthcare tools. However, they mainly leverage the textual content in the social media data, while other equally important content, like images and social behavior are ignored.

Deep learning approaches for cross-media data modeling. Micro-blog data is typical cross-media data. Items may come from diverse sources and modalities. It is difficult to handle the heterogeneous cross-media data. Recent years, extensive researches on deep learning show superior ability of deep neural networks (DNN) in learning features from large scale unlabeled data [12-14]. [15, 16] further extend the deep models for multimodal learning. [17] design a cross-media learning method based on DNN, and leverage the model for detecting psychological states and corresponding categories from a single tweet. However, stress is a continuous state compared to instant emotions, indicating that the stressed stated can last for several days in psychology [3]. It remains a challenge to make use of aggregated cross-media data for user-level modeling.
1.2相关工作
现有的应力检测方法。近年来，人们致力于开发方便的个人应力检测工具。研究人员正试图利用个人电脑和手机等普及设备进行日常压力检测。Hong L.等[7]提出了压力感知（StressSense），即使用智能手机从人声中隐秘地识别压力。Paredes，P.等[8]研究了使用电脑鼠标检测压力的初步实验室证据。然而，这些应用程序依赖于收集真实生活中的数据，这很容易引发反感。它使压力检测侵入了正常生活，无法在更多人中广泛应用。
利用社交媒体进行医疗保健的研究。随着社交网络的迅速普及，利用社交媒体数据进行身心健康的研究也越来越多。Sadilek等人[9]利用推特帖子识别流感症状的传播。Paul M.J.等[10]将疾病主题方面模型应用于150多万条健康相关推文，并发现行为风险因素与营养之间的相关性。Munmun等人[11]利用推特帖子中显示的行为线索，在抑郁症被报道之前预测它。这些研究表明了利用社交媒体数据开发医疗工具的可行性。然而，他们主要利用社交媒体数据中的文本内容，而忽略了其他同样重要的内容，如图像和社交行为。
跨媒体数据建模的深度学习方法。微博数据是典型的跨媒体数据。项目可能来自不同的来源和方式。异构跨媒体数据的处理比较困难。近年来，对深度学习的广泛研究表明，深度神经网络（DNN）在从大规模未标记数据中学习特征方面具有优越的能力[12-14]。[15，16]进一步扩展了多模式学习的深度模型。[17] 设计了一种基于DNN的跨媒体学习方法，并利用该模型从单个推文中检测心理状态和相应类别。然而，与即时情绪相比，压力是一种持续状态，这表明在心理学中，压力状态可以持续几天[3]。利用聚合的跨媒体数据进行用户级建模仍然是一个挑战。

1.3 Our Work
In this paper, we explore the potential to use social media to detect psychological stress for individuals. Micro-blog is one of the most popular social media that can be publicly accessed. People can post text with no more than 140 words, upload images or have social interactions with others. Employing real online micro-blog data, we first investigate the correlations