‘Feelings analysis applied to the prevention of suicide in social networks (ASAPS)’

Elena Lloret Pastor and Yoan Gutiérrez Vázquez, University of Alicante.

The aim of this project is to develop an application that can alert prevention services to possible suicides announced or referred to on digital ecosystems, social networks, blogs or the ‘dark web’.

The team will analyze, label and organize messages issued through these channels that express feelings of sadness, depression or suicidal intent (anonymously in order to respect the privacy of the authors). Using this corpus, they will apply different algorithms and tools of human language technology, including linguistic pattern recognition.

The results of this data processing exercise will be applied to developing a platform that issues warnings on detecting a suicidal intention or tendency. This will enable prevention services to step in before the problem gets worse, contacting the person affected and directing him or her to the appropriate hospital center.