Multi-view graph-based interview representation to improve depression level estimation

Depression is a serious mental illness that affects millions worldwide and consequently has attracted considerable research interest in recent years. Within the field of automated depression estimation, most researchers focus on neural network architectures while ignoring other research directions. Within this paper, we explore an alternate approach and study the impact of input representations on the learning ability of the models. In particular, we work with graph-based representations to highlight different aspects of input transcripts, both at the interview and corpus levels. We use sentence similarity graphs and keyword correlation graphs to exemplify the advantages of graphical representations over sequential models for binary classification problems within depression estimation. Additionally, we design multi-view architectures that split interview transcripts into question and answer views in order to take into account dialogue structure. Our experiments show the benefits of multi-view based graphical input encodings over sequential models and provide new state-of-the-art results for binary classification on the gold standard DAIC-WOZ dataset. Further analysis establishes our method as a means for generating meaningful insights and visual summaries of interview transcripts that can be used by medical professionals.