Tree hole rescue: an AI approach for suicide risk detection and online suicide intervention

Adolescent suicide has become an important social issue of general concern. Many young people express their suicidal feelings and intentions through online social media, e.g., Twitter, Microblog. The "tree hole" is the Chinese name for places on the Web where people post secrets. It provides the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence and big data technology to detect the posts where someone express the suicidal signal from those "tree hole" social media. We have developed the Web-based intelligent agents (i.e., AI-based programs) which can monitor the "tree hole" websites in Microblog every day by using knowledge graph technology. We have organized Tree-hole Rescue Team, which consists of more than 1000 volunteers, to carry out suicide rescue intervention according to the daily monitoring notifications. From 2018 to 2023, Tree-hole Rescue Team has prevented more than 6600 suicides. A few thousands of people have been saved within those 6 years. In this paper, we present the basic technology of Web-based Tree Hole intelligent agents and elaborate how the intelligent agents can discover suicide attempts and issue corresponding monitoring notifications and how the volunteers of Tree Hole Rescue Team can conduct online suicide intervention. This research also shows that the knowledge graph approach can be used for the semantic analysis on social media.