  Stress and depression are prevalent nowadays across people of all ages due to
the quick paces of life. People use social media to express their feelings.
Thus, social media constitute a valuable form of information for the early
detection of stress and depression. Although many research works have been
introduced targeting the early recognition of stress and depression, there are
still limitations. There have been proposed multi-task learning settings, which
use depression and emotion (or figurative language) as the primary and
auxiliary tasks respectively. However, although stress is inextricably linked
with depression, researchers face these two tasks as two separate tasks. To
address these limitations, we present the first study, which exploits two
different datasets collected under different conditions, and introduce two
multitask learning frameworks, which use depression and stress as the main and
auxiliary tasks respectively. Specifically, we use a depression dataset and a
stressful dataset including stressful posts from ten subreddits of five
domains. In terms of the first approach, each post passes through a shared BERT
layer, which is updated by both tasks. Next, two separate BERT encoder layers
are exploited, which are updated by each task separately. Regarding the second
approach, it consists of shared and task-specific layers weighted by attention
fusion networks. We conduct a series of experiments and compare our approaches
with existing research initiatives, single-task learning, and transfer
learning. Experiments show multiple advantages of our approaches over
state-of-the-art ones.
