RUDA-2025: Depression Severity Detection Using Pre-Trained Transformers on Social Media Data

Depression is a serious mental health disorder affecting cognition, emotions, and behavior. It impacts over 300 million people globally, with mental health care costs exceeding $1 trillion annually. Traditional diagnostic methods are often expensive, time-consuming, stigmatizing, and difficult to access. This study leverages NLP techniques to identify depressive cues in social media posts, focusing on both standard Urdu and code-mixed Roman Urdu, which are often overlooked in existing research. To the best of our knowledge, a script-conversion and combination-based approach for Roman Urdu and Nastaliq Urdu has not been explored earlier. To address this gap, our study makes four key contributions. First, we created a manually annotated dataset named Ruda-2025, containing posts in code-mixed Roman Urdu and Nastaliq Urdu for both binary and multiclass classification. The binary classes are depression” and not depression, with the depression class further divided into fine-grained categories: Mild, Moderate, and Severe depression alongside not depression. Second, we applied first-time two novel techniques to the RUDA-2025 dataset: (1) script-conversion approach that translates between code-mixed Roman Urdu and Standard Urdu and (2) combination-based approach that merges both scripts to make a single dataset to address linguistic challenges in depression assessment. Finally, we employed 60 different experiments using a combination of traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques to find the best-fit model for the detection of mental disorder. Based on our analysis, our proposed model (mBERT) using custom attention mechanism outperformed baseline (XGB) in combination-based, code-mixed Roman and Nastaliq Urdu script conversions.