Sentiment Analysis of Suicide Notes: A Shared Task

This paper reports on a shared task involving the assignment of emotions to suicide notes. Two features distinguished this task from previous shared tasks in the biomedical domain. One is that it resulted in the corpus of fully anonymized clinical text and annotated suicide notes. This resource is permanently available and will (we hope) facilitate future research. The other key feature of the task is that it required categorization with respect to a large set of labels. The number of participants was larger than in any previous biomedical challenge task. We describe the data production process and the evaluation measures, and give a preliminary analysis of the results. Many systems performed at levels approaching the inter-coder agreement, suggesting that human-like performance on this task is within the reach of currently available technologies.