This AI bot finds suicidal messages on China’s Weibo to help save lives

Wang Le’s bedroom is dim and silent, the curtains tightly drawn. The only sounds come from mouse clicks and a clattering keyboard. Unable to live and work like a normal person for nearly a decade due to a social phobia, the internet has been his only connection to the outside world. It even saved his life.

Wang had to rely on his relatives to leave food at his front gate every week or two because he could not even order takeout if it meant talking to people by phone. In the spring, he contemplated suicide, but hesitated. Afraid of death – but also afraid of life – he shared his despair on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social platform in China.

“Are you OK?” a stranger said in a message he received soon after. “Would you like to talk to me?”

Photo credit: imtmphoto / 123RF

In his late 20s, Wang lives alone in a small town in northern China. His parents are migrant workers in one of the country’s biggest cities. The message moved him, knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who cared for him.

Wang has since befriended the stranger, who turned out to be a psychological consultant. She found him with the help of the Tree Hole bot, an AI program that spots suicidal intentions on Weibo and alerts a group of nearly 600 psychological scholars, consultants, and volunteers who reach out to those in trouble.

Launched in July 2018, the team has prevented more than 1,000 suicides, said Huang Zhisheng, creator of the program and a senior AI researcher at Vrije University of Amsterdam.

As the team is small and charitable in nature, they can only cope with the most urgent cases and even some of those do not respond to their outreach, Huang explained.

The bot was named because it scans so-called tree hole posts on Weibo, where people share and comment on emotional stories. It is the modern-day equivalent of whispering secrets into a tree hole in the old days. One of the biggest Weibo tree holes dates back to 2012, posted by a depressed girl before she committed suicide. Users still add comments on a regular basis, with more than 1 million to date.

In China, at least 136,000 people committed suicide in 2016, accounting for 17% of the world’s total that year, according to the latest data available from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Suicide is the second most primary cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds globally, according to WHO, which projected that 1.5 million people of all age groups will take their own lives over the next year.

While research has found that one of the best ways to prevent suicides is for the distressed person to hear from those who care about them, people like Wang not only lack family support, they also live in smaller cities that have limited or no access to professional psychological services. For these people, AI plays an essential role in connecting desperate souls with resources.

Outside China, internet and social giants including Google, Facebook, and Pinterest have used AI to assess suicide risk among users and identify suicidal or self-injury content. However, there are limitations in using AI for the follow-up process of finding suicidal people in time and helping those with mental health problems, especially given privacy concerns.

The Tree Hole bot automatically scans Weibo every four hours, pulling up posts containing words and phrases like “death,” “release from life,” or “end of the world.”

The bot draws on a knowledge graph of suicide notions and concepts, applying semantic analysis programming so it understands that “not want to” and “live” in one sentence may indicate suicidal tendency.