LAXARY: A Trustworthy Explainable Twitter Analysis Model for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Assessment

Abstract

Veteran mental health is a significant national problem as large number of veterans are returning from the recent war in Iraq and continued military presence in Afghanistan. While significant existing works have investigated twitter posts-based Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) assessment using blackbox machine learning techniques, these frameworks cannot be trusted by the clinicians due to the lack of clinical explainabil-ity. To obtain the trust of clinicians, we explore the big question, can twitter posts provide enough information to fill up clinical PTSD assessment surveys that have been traditionally trusted by clinicians? To answer the above question, we propose, LAXARY (Linguistic Analysis-based Exaplainable Inquiry) model, a novel Explainable Artificial Intelligent (XAI) model to detect and represent PTSD assessment of twitter users using a modified Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis. First, we employ clinically validated survey tools for collecting clinical PTSD assessment data from real twitter users and develop a PTSD Linguistic Dictionary using the PTSD assessment survey results. Then, we use the PTSD Linguistic Dictionary along with machine learning model to fill up the survey tools towards detecting PTSD status and its intensity of corresponding twitter users. Our experimental evaluation on 210 clinically validated veteran twitter users provides promising accuracies of both PTSD classification and its intensity estimation. We also evaluate our developed PTSD Linguistic Dictionary's reliability and validity.