Warning: blog depression alert!
Israeli inventors say they have developed a program that can screen depression sufferers by surfing blogs.
The program analyzes text, looking for cues of unhealthy state of mind in descriptions and metaphors, reports Haaretz newspaper on Monday.
In a test run, the software munched more than 1,000 posts written by American bloggers and was asked to sort out the 100 most depressed and 100 least depressed individuals.
"We found an 80 per cent match between the automatic identification mechanism of the software and the human diagnosis given by the psychologists," said Professor Yair Neuman of Ben-Gurion University's Department of Education.
Vladimir Kremlev for RT (click to enlarge)
He explained that humans perform better because they can use intuition, while the program has no such luxury.
"The software does not rely on a single context-dependent word, but on a series of words strung together, terms and images chosen by the writer," said Neuman.
The research and development for the software was funded by the Defense Ministry, yet Ben-Gurion University officials said yesterday the project would not be used for military purposes, the newspaper reports.
Scientists suggest using their algorithm to automatically identify people with psychological difficulties, so that doctors can contact them and suggest counseling.
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