disorders trying to detect some indicators of
appearance of initial signs of depression and
understanding the evolution of an individual from the
early stages (e.g. mood changes, lack of sleep) to
severe stages (e.g. suicidal thoughts).
Focusing only in the ontological component of the
language patterns, this paper proposes a model that
adds the temporal component to current ontology
learning models, allowing us to perform evolutionary
analysis of both linguistic and ontological features to
texts from social networks. The model has been
applied to an external corpus of depression from
social media texts. The application shows how we can
add the temporal dimension to existing ontology
learning models in a real case, as well as produces a
valuable corpus of ontological and linguistic pattern
results over time in depression contexts.
2 BACKGROUND
Two main areas are related with our proposal: 1)
ontology learning methods from English unstructured
text from social networks, and 2) existing works
specifically focused on depression detection
software, contextualizing the application of our
proposal to this field.
2.1 Ontology Learning
Ontology Learning is defined as the discovering of
the underlined ontology from textual sources
(Hazman et al., 2011). As an ontology, we understand
here “an explicit, formal specification of a shared
conceptualization of a domain of interest” (Gruber,
1995). Thus, the underlined ontology of a given text
allow us to extract information about a) concepts and
relations referred in the source texts and b) linguistic
patterns used for referring to these concepts and
relations. This information conforms a relevant input
in the language studies, including applications of
ontology learning in biomedical or legal domain
(Morales, Scherer, & Levitan, 2017).
Firstly, we can find in literature initial approaches
trying to extract in a semiautomatic or automatic way
some ontological information from linguistic
patterns, such as processes relations or event mining
(Reuter & Cimiano, 2012). Regarding these studies,
most of them present high scores on recognition in a
limited functional environment or limited to a specific
domain or tasks.
Secondly, there are existing attempts for enriching
ontology learning with text mining techniques from
2000, e.g. some workshops in ECAI conference
(Staab, Maedche, Nedellec, & Wiemer-Hastings,
2000), to present. Main concerns here includes topical
concepts and concept definitions agreement within
the corresponding community, learning associations
from texts, Named Entity and Terminology
extraction, Acquisition of selected restrictions from
texts, Word Sense disambiguation or computation of
concept lattices from texts. We can also classify all
these text mining works in function of the kind of
technological technique employed: supervised (based
on previous annotations) vs. unsupervised.
Wimalasuriya survey (Wimalasuriya & Dejing, 2010)
presents the most common software architecture for
this kind of techniques, as well as some examples of
classical applications domains. In addition, some
authors (Asim, Wasim, Khan, Mahmood, & Abbasi,
2018; Brewster, 2006; Hazman et al., 2011;
Shamsfard & Barforoush, 2003; Somodevilla, Ayala,
& Pineda, 2018; Wimalasuriya & Dejing, 2010)
recently perform exhaustive reviews of the current
software methods for ontology learning. All these
methods have been successfully applied to a wide
variety of domains, which makes ontology learning a
solid area to consider when we want to extract
complex information (linguistically and conceptually
based) from unstructured sources.
Regarding ontology learning in social media
contexts, most of the approaches focused on
extracting parts of the ontology (Asim et al., 2018;
Breslin, 2012; Reuter & Cimiano, 2012), such as
concepts or events, particularizing approaches for
texts with shorter length and interaction
characteristics similar to dialogue (posts-based
interactions).
In summary, ontology learning is a promising area
with successful applications both at the level of
manual analysis and semi-automation. However,
none of the current methods recently reviewed (Asim
et al., 2018; Wimalasuriya & Dejing, 2010), even in
social media contexts, have specific temporality
support. This means that current methods extract the
underlying ontology as a snapshot of the text at a
specific time. In reported applications, this snapshot
condenses enough information. However, it does not
allow the study of the evolution in the underlying
ontology of the text or its linguistic patterns over
time. Because of our needs in the domain of mental
illness, we think that the inclusion of a temporary
layer to the ontology learning methods will facilitate
this evolutionary analysis and allow us a better
investigation of the connection and evolution of
linguistic and ontological patterns in depression
contexts.