Federated learning for privacy-preserving depression detection with multilingual language models in social media posts.

The incidences of mental health illnesses, such as suicidal ideation and depression, are increasing, which highlights the urgent need for early detection methods. There is a growing interest in using natural language processing (NLP) models to analyze textual data from patients, but accessing patients' data for research purposes can be challenging due to privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach that can balance the need for centralized learning with data ownership sensitivity. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of FL models in detecting depression by using a simulated multilingual dataset. We analyzed social media posts in five different languages with varying sample sizes. Our findings indicate that FL achieves strong performance in most cases while maintaining clients' privacy for both independent and non-independent client partitioning.

Evaluating sentence representations for biomedical text: Methods and experimental results.

Text representations ar one of the main inputs to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. Given the fast developmental pace of new sentence embedding methods, we argue that there is a need for a unified methodology to assess these different techniques in the biomedical domain. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation of novel methods across ten medical classification tasks. The tasks cover a variety of BioNLP problems such as semantic similarity, question answering, citation sentiment analysis and others with binary and multi-class datasets. Our goal is to assess the transferability of different sentence representation schemes to the medical and clinical domain. Our analysis shows that embeddings based on Language Models which account for the context-dependent nature of words, usually outperform others in terms of performance. Nonetheless, there is no single embedding model that perfectly represents biomedical and clinical texts with consistent performance across all tasks. This illustrates the need for a more suitable bio-encoder. Our MedSentEval source code, pre-trained embeddings and examples have been made available on GitHub.

The SNPcurator: literature mining of enriched SNP-disease associations.

Database URL: http://snpcurator.science.uu.nl/.