Machine translation for suicide detection: validating spanish datasetsusing machine and deep learning models

Abstract

Suicide is a complex health concern that affects not only individuals but society as a whole. The application of traditional strategies to prevent, assess, and treat this condition has proven inefficient in a modern world in which interactions are mainly made online. Thus, in recent years, multidisciplinary efforts have explored how computational techniques could be applied to automatically detect individuals who desire to end their lives on textual input. Such methodologies rely on two main technical approaches: text-based classification and deep learning. Further, these methods rely on datasets labeled with relevant information, often sourced from clinically-curated social media posts or healthcare records, and more recently, public social media data has proven especially valuable for this purpose. Nonetheless, research focused on the application of computational algorithms for detecting suicide or its ideation is still an emerging field of study. In particular, investigations on this topic have recently considered specific factors, like language or socio-cultural contexts, that affect the causality, rationality, and intentionality of an individual’s manifestation, to improve the assessment made on textual data. Consequently, problems like the lack of data in non-Anglo-Saxon contexts capable of exploiting computational techniques for detecting suicidal ideation are still a pending endeavor. Thus, this thesis addresses the limited availability of suicide ideation datasets in non-Anglo-Saxon contexts, particularly for Spanish, despite its global significance as a widely spoken language. The research hypothesizes that Machine- Translated Spanish datasets can yield comparable results (within a ±5% performance range) to English datasets when training machine learning and deep learning models for suicide ideation detection. To test this, multiple machine translation models were evaluated, and the two most optimal models were selected to translate an English dataset of social media posts into Spanish. The English and translated Spanish datasets were then processed through a binary classification task using SVM, Logistic Regression, CNN, and LSTM models. Results demonstrated that the translated Spanish datasets achieved scores in performance metrics close to the original English set across all classifiers, with limited variations in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC AUC, and MCC metrics remaining within the hypothesized ±5% range. For example, the SVM classifier on the translated Spanish sets achieved an accuracy of 90%, closely matching the 91% achieved on the original English set. These findings confirm that machine-translated datasets can serve as effective resources for training ML and DL models for suicide ideation detection in Spanish, thereby supporting the viability of extending suicide detection models to non-English-speaking populations. This contribution provides a methodological foundation for expanding suicide prevention tools to diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, potentially benefiting health organizations and academic institutions interested in psychological computation.