Hunting Suicide Notes in Web 2.0 - Preliminary Findings

Blogs provide an outlet for youth to explore and share their emotions with the world. By exploring the possibilities of mining the vast repositories of social networking sites, we hope to be able to identify bloggers who are at risk of suicide so that appropriate intervention can take place. This paper will explore the techniques used by other researchers in the process of identifying emotional content in unstructured data, and will make use of existing technologies to attempt to identify at-risk bloggers. Using a selection of real blog entries harvested from MySpace.com, supplemented with artificial entries from our research, we test the accuracy of a simple algorithm for scoring the presence of certain key words and phrases in blog entries. Despite the simplistic approach taken, the preliminary results of this study were very promising.