Towards Explainability in Using Deep Learning for the Detection of Anorexia in Social Media

Explainability of deep learning models has become increasingly important as neural-based approaches are now prevalent in natural language processing. Explainability is particularly important when dealing with a sensitive domain application such as clinical psychology. This paper focuses on the quantitative assessment of user-level attention mechanism in the task of detecting signs of anorexia in social media users from their posts. The assessment is done through monitoring the performance measures of a neural classifier, with and without user-level attention, when only a limited number of highly-weighted posts are provided. Results show that the weights assigned by the user-level attention strongly correlate with the amount of information that posts provide in showing if their author is at risk of anorexia or not, and hence can be used to explain the decision of the neural classifier.