Combining DistilBERT and LSTM to Enhanced Detection of Depression in Social Media Text

Depression affects a significant number of people, and it has a significant impact not only on their lives but also on society as a whole. In light of this, we require more advanced methods that are capable of locating individuals who are depressed in a timely and accurate manner. This research investigates the effectiveness of Long Short-Term Mem- ory (LSTM) networks used in conjunction with DistilBERT, a small transformer-based model, in identifying indications of melancholy in posts made on social networking platforms. The text was cleaned up using a dataset that was obtained from Reddit, and then we used the mixed DistilBERT+LSTM model to evaluate how well it performed in comparison to the DistilBERT model by itself. The findings that we obtained indicate that both approaches produce results that are comparable but not flawless, with only slight variations in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores. The fact that this is the case demonstrates that there are issues with optimizing the model and displaying the data.