Applying text mining methods to suicide research

OBJECTIVE: To introduce the research methods of computerized text mining and its possible applications in suicide research and to demonstrate the procedures of applying a specific text mining area, document classification, to a suicide-related study. METHOD: A systematic search of academic papers that applied text mining methods to suicide research was conducted. Relevant papers were reviewed focusing on their research objectives and sources of data. Furthermore, a case of using natural language processing and document classification methods to analyze a large amount of suicide news was elaborated to showcase the methods. RESULTS: Eighty-six papers using text mining methods for suicide research have been published since 2001. The most common research objective (72.1%) was to classify which documents exhibit suicide risk or were written by suicidal people. The most frequently used data source was online social media posts (45.3%), followed by e-healthcare records (25.6%). For the news classification case, the top three classifiers trained for classification tasks achieved 84% or higher accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Computerized text mining methods can help to scale up content analysis capacity and efficiency and uncover new insights and perspectives for suicide research.