Affect and personality aware analysis of speech content for automatic estimation of depression severity

The detection of depression has gained a significant amount of scientific attention for its potential in early diagnosis and intervention. In light of this, we propose a novel approach that places exclusive emphasis on textual features for depression severity estimation. The proposed method seamlessly integrates affect (emotion and sentiment), and personality features as distinct yet interconnected modalities within a transformer-based architecture. Our key contribution lies in a masked multimodal joint cross-attention fusion, which adeptly combines the information gleaned from these different text modalities. This fusion approach empowers the model not only to discern subtle contextual cues within textual data but also to comprehend intricate interdependencies between the modalities. A comprehensive experimental evaluation is undertaken to meticulously assess the individual components comprising the proposed architecture, as well as extraneous ones that are not inherent to it. The evaluation additionally includes the assessments conducted in a unimodal setting where the impact of each modality is examined individually. The findings derived from these experiments substantiate the self-contained efficacy of our architecture. Furthermore, we explore the significance of individual sentences within speech content, offering valuable insights into the contribution of specific textual cues and we perform a segmented evaluation of the proposed method for different ranges of depression severity. Finally, we compare our method with existing state-of-the-art studies utilizing different combinations of auditory, visual, and textual features. The final results demonstrate that our method achieves promising results in depression severity estimation, outperforming the other methods.