Exploring transformers and time lag features for predicting changes in mood over time

This paper presents transformer-based models created for the CLPsych 2022 shared task. Using posts from Reddit users over a period of time, we aim to predict changes in mood from post to post. We test models that preserve timeline information through explicit ordering of posts as well as those that do not order posts but preserve features on the length of time between a user’s posts. We find that a model with temporal information may provide slight benefits over the same model without such information, although a RoBERTa transformer model provides enough information to make similar predictions without custom-encoded time information.