Persian Depression Detection Chatbot Using Deep Learning

Depression is a common and serious mental illness that affects millions of people worldwide. Early diagnosis and treatment of depression are essential to improve the quality of life of those affected. Traditional methods of diagnosing depression include interviews with psychiatrists and completion of psychological questionnaires. These methods are time-consuming and costly, and some people may find it difficult to verbally discuss their depression symptoms. In this study, a Persian chatbot based on deep learning was designed and implemented to diagnose depression. The chatbot was trained using textual data related to individuals with depression and healthy individuals. The data used in this study was collected from Moshaver Co Forum, which includes question and answer exchanges and information sharing among Iranian users on this web platform, in two categories of depression and non-depression. The results show that the proposed chatbot is able to diagnose depression with an accuracy of over 85% and an F1 score of 80.5%, which shows better performance compared to similar researches. This Persian chatbot can serve as a useful tool for early diagnosis and treatment of depression.