Federated learning for privacy-preserving depression detection with multilingual language models in social media posts

The incidences of mental health illnesses, such as suicidal ideation and depression, are increasing, which highlights the urgent need for early detection methods. There is a growing interest in using natural language processing (NLP) models to analyze textual data from patients, but accessing patients’ data for research purposes can be challenging due to privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach that can balance the need for centralized learning with data ownership sensitivity. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of FL models in detecting depression by using a simulated multilingual dataset. We analyzed social media posts in five different languages with varying sample sizes. Our findings indicate that FL achieves strong performance in most cases while maintaining clients’ privacy for both independent and non-independent client partitioning.