PsihoRo: Depression and Anxiety Romanian Text Corpus
This addresses a gap in psychological NLP resources for the Romanian language, enabling research on mental health analysis in this specific domain, though it is an incremental step as it applies an existing data collection method to a new language.
The authors tackled the lack of open-source mental health text data in Romanian by creating PsihoRo, the first corpus for depression and anxiety in Romanian, consisting of texts from 205 respondents collected via open-ended questions and standardized screening questionnaires.
Psychological corpora in NLP are collections of texts used to analyze human psychology, emotions, and mental health. These texts allow researchers to study psychological constructs, detect mental health issues and analyze emotional language. However, mental health data can be difficult to collect correctly from social media, due to suppositions made by the collectors. A more pragmatic strategy involves gathering data through open-ended questions and then assessing this information with self-report screening surveys. This method was employed successfully for English, a language with a lot of psychological NLP resources. However, this cannot be stated for Romanian, which currently has no open-source mental health corpus. To address this gap, we have created the first corpus for depression and anxiety in Romanian, by utilizing a form with 6 open-ended questions along with the standardized PHQ-9 and GAD-7 screening questionnaires. Consisting of the texts of 205 respondents and although it may seem small, PsihoRo is a first step towards understanding and analyzing texts regarding the mental health of the Romanian population. We employ statistical analysis, text analysis using Romanian LIWC, emotion detection and topic modeling to show what are the most important features of this newly introduced resource to the NLP community.