HCAG: A Hierarchical Context-Aware Graph Attention Model for Depression Detection

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders, it’s crucial to design an effective and robust model for automatic depression detection (ADD). Although current approaches rely on extra topic models or manually topic-selection procedures which is time-consuming, they still haven’t thoroughly explored the sufficient context information among clinical interviews. In this paper, we propose HCAG, a novel Hierarchical Context-Aware Graph attention model for ADD. Our model mirrors the hierarchical structure of depression assessment and leverages the Graph Attention Network (GAT) to grasp relational contextual information of text/audio modality. Experiments on the DAIC-WOZ dataset show a great performance improvement, with the Fl-score of 0.92, a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.94, and a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 3.80. To the best of our knowledge, our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.