"Who can help me?": Knowledge Infused Matching of Support Seekers and Support Providers during COVID-19 on Reddit
This addresses the need for scalable and timely mental health support for individuals affected by anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 crisis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing matching concepts with knowledge infusion.
The paper tackles the problem of matching support seekers with support providers on Reddit during COVID-19 by developing a medical knowledge-infused approach, validated by 21 domain experts to show efficacy.
During the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, subreddits on Reddit, such as r/Coronavirus saw a rapid growth in user's requests for help (support seekers - SSs) including individuals with varying professions and experiences with diverse perspectives on care (support providers - SPs). Currently, knowledgeable human moderators match an SS with a user with relevant experience, i.e, an SP on these subreddits. This unscalable process defers timely care. We present a medical knowledge-infused approach to efficient matching of SS and SPs validated by experts for the users affected by anxiety and depression, in the context of with COVID-19. After matching, each SP to an SS labeled as either supportive, informative, or similar (sharing experiences) using the principles of natural language inference. Evaluation by 21 domain experts indicates the efficacy of incorporated knowledge and shows the efficacy the matching system.