Automated Assessment of Patients’ Self-Narratives for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Screening Using Natural Language Processing and Text Mining

• Published in: Assessment (Odessa, Fla.) Vol. 24; no. 2; pp. 157 - 172
• Main Authors: He, Qiwei, Veldkamp, Bernard P., Glas, Cees A. W., de Vries, Theo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Algorithms; Data Mining; Decision Trees; Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; Early Diagnosis; Female; Humans; Mass Screening; Narration; Natural Language Processing; Personality Assessment - statistics & numerical data; Reproducibility of Results; Self Report; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - classification; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - diagnosis; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology; assessment; screening; text mining; self-narratives; natural language processing; posttraumatic stress disorder
• ISSN: 1073-1911; 1552-3489; 1552-3489
• DOI: 10.1177/1073191115602551

Patients’ narratives about traumatic experiences and symptoms are useful in clinical screening and diagnostic procedures. In this study, we presented an automated assessment system to screen patients for posttraumatic stress disorder via a natural language processing and text-mining approach. Four machine-learning algorithms—including decision tree, naive Bayes, support vector machine, and an alternative classification approach called the product score model—were used in combination with n-gram representation models to identify patterns between verbal features in self-narratives and psychiatric diagnoses. With our sample, the product score model with unigrams attained the highest prediction accuracy when compared with practitioners’ diagnoses. The addition of multigrams contributed most to balancing the metrics of sensitivity and specificity. This article also demonstrates that text mining is a promising approach for analyzing patients’ self-expression behavior, thus helping clinicians identify potential patients from an early stage.