Mental health forums are online communities where people express their issues
and seek help from moderators and other users. In such forums, there are often
posts with severe content indicating that the user is in acute distress and
there is a risk of attempted self-harm. Moderators need to respond to these
severe posts in a timely manner to prevent potential self-harm. However, the
large volume of daily posted content makes it difficult for the moderators to
locate and respond to these critical posts. We present a framework for triaging
user content into four severity categories which are defined based on
indications of self-harm ideation. Our models are based on a feature-rich
classification framework which includes lexical, psycholinguistic, contextual
and topic modeling features. Our approaches improve the state of the art in
triaging the content severity in mental health forums by large margins (up to
17% improvement over the F-1 scores). Using the proposed model, we analyze the
mental state of users and we show that overall, long-term users of the forum
demonstrate a decreased severity of risk over time. Our analysis on the
interaction of the moderators with the users further indicates that without an
automatic way to identify critical content, it is indeed challenging for the
moderators to provide timely response to the users in need.

该研究提出了一种基于多种特征的框架来将用户发帖在划分为四个自残意象严重程度级别，并使用该模型分析用户的心理状态，并展示长期使用论坛的用户的风险程度减少的情况，该模型对有效识别用户自残风险方面大幅优于现有技术（F-1 分数高达 17% 的提升），同时指出在没有自动方式识别关键内容的条件下，对于管理员来说，及时解决用户的诉求非常具有挑战性。