Linguistic Approach to Suicide Detection

Suicide is a major, preventable public health problem. Particularly the problem is critical for young people. In Russia every year thousands of teenagers commit suicide. In most of the cases it can be prevented if a risky state is detected. Nowadays internet becomes a major way of communication, mainly in the text form. Therefore we suggest a method to detect a tendency to suicide based on text messages. Our main approach is to study indicators of such condition and based on it use machine learning approach to build a classifier that could determine, whether the person is about to commit a suicide. Our experiments are based on the analysis of texts of Russian writers for past 100 years that committed suicide.