Postgraduate psychological stress detection from social media using BERT-Fused model

PLoS One. 2024 Oct 31;19(10):e0312264. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0312264. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Postgraduate students face various academic, personal, and social stressors that increase their risk of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Identifying cost-effective methods of detecting and intervening before stress turns into severe problems is crucial. However, existing stress detection methods typically rely on psychological scales or devices, which can be complex and expensive. Therefore, we propose a BERT-fused model for rapidly and automatically detecting postgraduate students' psychological stress via social media. First, we construct an improved BERT-LDA feature extraction algorithm to extract group stress features from large-scale and complex social media data. Then, we integrate the BiLSTM-CRF named entity recognition model to construct a multi-dimensional psychological stress profile and analyze the fine-grained feature representation under the fusion of multi-dimensional features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms traditional models such as BiLSTM, achieving an accuracy of 92.55%, a recall of 93.47%, and an F1-score of 92.18%, with F1-scores exceeding 89% for all three types of entities. This research provides both theoretical and practical foundations for universities or institutions to conduct fine-grained perception and intervention for postgraduate students' psychological stress.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Humans
  • Social Media*
  • Stress, Psychological* / diagnosis
  • Stress, Psychological* / psychology
  • Students / psychology

Grants and funding

1. Author: Xu Tan Grant Number: 202008291726500001 Funder: The Shenzhen Basic Research Project for Development of Science and Technology Website: http://stic.sz.gov.cn 2. Author: Xu Tan Grant Number: 2020KCXTD040 Funder: The Innovation Team Project of Colleges in Guangdong Province Website: https://edu.gd.gov.cn 3. Author: Dongsheng Chen Grant Number: 2020A1515010566 Funder: The Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province Website: http://gdstc.gd.gov.cn The funders play important role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.