Tracking Life’s Ups and Downs: Mining Life Events from Social Media Posts for Mental Health Analysis
Minghao Lv, Siyuan Chen, Haoan Jin, Minghao Yuan, Qianqian Ju, Yujia Peng, Kenny Q. Zhu, Mengyue Wu
Abstract
Social media platforms possess considerable potential in the realm of exploring mental health. Previous research has indicated that major life events can greatly impact individuals’ mental health. However, due to the complexity and ambiguity nature of life events, shedding its light on social media data is quite challenging. In this paper, we are dedicated to uncovering life events mentioned in posts on social media. We hereby provide a carefully-annotated social media event dataset, PsyEvent, which encompasses 12 major life event categories that are likely to occur in everyday life. This dataset is human-annotated under iterative procedure and boasts a high level of quality. Furthermore, by applying the life events extracted from posts to downstream tasks such as early risk detection of depression and suicide risk prediction, we have observed a considerable improvement in performance. This suggests that extracting life events from social media can be beneficial for the analysis of individuals’ mental health.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lv-etal-2025-tracking,
title = "Tracking Life{'}s Ups and Downs: Mining Life Events from Social Media Posts for Mental Health Analysis",
author = "Lv, Minghao and
Chen, Siyuan and
Jin, Haoan and
Yuan, Minghao and
Ju, Qianqian and
Peng, Yujia and
Zhu, Kenny Q. and
Wu, Mengyue",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.345/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.345",
pages = "6950--6965",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}