The 2016 CLPsych Shared Task is centered on the automatic triage of posts from a mental health forum, ReachOut.com. ReachOut.com is an online youth mental health service the provides information, tools and support to young people aged 14-25. A key part of this service are the ReachOut forums . These forums provide a method for young people to communicate with each other about issues anonymously, as well as a trained team of moderators for providing specific support and guidance to users. Moderators also escalate concerns about particular posts (e.g., in the case of self-harm) where needed; this shared task looks towards supporting the moderators with automatic triage of posts.

For this task, ReachOut has annotated a corpus of posts with a red/amber/green semaphore that indicates how urgently a post needs needs moderator attention. Systems will need to leverage the content of posts, including sentiment, topics, thread context, and user history to classify posts as red/amber/green. This task motivates research in these specific areas, as well as the broader topic of classifying mental health topics in social media. In addition, ReachOut itself is interested in working with the researchers to integrate the developed techniques back into the ReachOut systems.

The 2016 CLPsych Shared Task is organized by Glen Pink, Ben Hachey, David Milne, and Rafael Calvo at the University of Sydney.

TIMELINE

Data distributed: February ~10, 2016
Test data distributed: March 7, 2016
Test submission deadline: March 11, 2016
Results distributed by: March 14, 2016
System description paper submissions deadline: March 24, 2016

SYSTEM

The submitted system is the outcome of a Master’s student’s project.
The system description can be found in (Almeida et al. 2016).