How do people discuss mental health on social media? Can we train a computer program to recognize differences between discussions of depression and other topics? Can an algorithm predict that someone is depressed from their tweets alone? In this project, we collect tweets referencing “depression” and “depressed” over a seven year period, and train word embeddings to characterize linguistic structures within the corpus. We find that neural word embeddings capture the contextual differences between “depressed” and “healthy” language. We also looked at how context around words may have changed over time to get deeper understanding of contextual shifts in the word usage. Finally, we trained a deep learning network on a much smaller collection of tweets authored by individuals formally diagnosed with depression. The best performing model for the prediction task is Convolutional LSTM (CNN-LSTM) model with a F-score of 69% on test data. The results suggest social media could serve as a valuable screening tool for mental health.

Machine learning of distributed word representations with neural embeddings is a state-of-the-art approach to modelling semantic relationships hidden in natural language. The thesis “Clustering of Distributed Word Representations and its Applicability for Enterprise Search” covers different aspects of how such a model can be applied to knowledge management in enterprises. A review of distributed word representations and related language modelling techniques, combined with an overview of applicable clustering algorithms, constitutes the basis for practical studies. The latter have two goals: firstly, they examine the quality of German embedding models trained with gensim and a selected choice of parameter configurations. Secondly, clusterings conducted on the resulting word representations are evaluated against the objective of retrieving immediate semantic relations for a given term. The application of the final results to company-wide knowledge management is subsequently outlined by the example of the platform intergator and conceptual extensions."

Machine learning of distributed word representations with neural embeddings is a state-of-the-art approach to modelling semantic relationships hidden in natural language. The thesis “Clustering of Distributed Word Representations and its Applicability for Enterprise Search” covers different aspects of how such a model can be applied to knowledge management in enterprises. A review of distributed word representations and related language modelling techniques, combined with an overview of applicable clustering algorithms, constitutes the basis for practical studies. The latter have two goals: firstly, they examine the quality of German embedding models trained with gensim and a selected choice of parameter configurations. Secondly, clusterings conducted on the resulting word representations are evaluated against the objective of retrieving immediate semantic relations for a given term. The application of the final results to company-wide knowledge management is subsequently outlined by the example of the platform intergator and conceptual extensions.":1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Thesis Structure 2 Related Work 3 Distributed Word Representations 3.1 History 3.2 Parallels to Biological Neurons 3.3 Feedforward and Recurrent Neural Networks 3.4 Learning Representations via Backpropagation and Stochastic Gradient Descent 3.5 Word2Vec 3.5.1 Neural Network Architectures and Update Frequency 3.5.2 Hierarchical Softmax 3.5.3 Negative Sampling 3.5.4 Parallelisation 3.5.5 Exploration of Linguistic Regularities 4 Clustering Techniques 4.1 Categorisation 4.2 The Curse of Dimensionality 5 Training and Evaluation of Neural Embedding Models 5.1 Technical Setup 5.2 Model Training 5.2.1 Corpus 5.2.2 Data Segmentation and Ordering 5.2.3 Stopword Removal 5.2.4 Morphological Reduction 5.2.5 Extraction of Multi-Word Concepts 5.2.6 Parameter Selection 5.3 Evaluation Datasets 5.3.1 Measurement Quality Concerns 5.3.2 Semantic Similarities 5.3.3 Regularities Expressed by Analogies 5.3.4 Construction of a Representative Test Set for Evaluation of Paradigmatic Relations 5.3.5 Metrics 5.4 Discussion 6 Evaluation of Semantic Clustering on Word Embeddings 6.1 Qualitative Evaluation 6.2 Discussion 6.3 Summary 7 Conceptual Integration with an Enterprise Search Platform 7.1 The intergator Search Platform 7.2 Deployment Concepts of Distributed Word Representations 7.2.1 Improved Document Retrieval 7.2.2 Improved Query Suggestions 7.2.3 Additional Support in Explorative Search 8 Conclusion 8.1 Summary 8.2 Further Work Bibliography List of Figures List of Tables Appendix