Natural Language Processing for Understanding Mental Health around Covid-19

Social distancing, numerous job losses and expected economic downturns due to the current outbreak are likely to have significant implications on people’s mental health, leading to an increased rate of depression. We plan to develop natural language processing techniques to understand the mental health issues (or changes in mental health) associated with the pandemic and whether certain people are more susceptible to be affected by these changes. We will leverage our expertise in developing NLP approaches for suicide risk assessment.