Employees of the Department of Information Systems at the Poznań University of Economics and Business, Prof. Agata Filipowska and Oskar Riewe-Perła, took part in the eRisk 2024 competition. The aim of the competition was to develop a system for early recognition of people with anorexia based on their activity on social media platforms.
Among the numerous teams that submitted their solutions, the method developed by our scientists achieved the best result according to the ERDE (Early Risk Detection Error) measure. This measure takes into account both the precision of the results and the time it takes to alert on the possibility that a person may be suffering from anorexia. This aspect was a key element of the competition and has a real impact when using early warning systems.
The developed method uses the latest achievements in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and the architecture of recommendation systems. By analyzing the behavior of content-suggestion models based on user similarities, this method assesses whether the recommended content comes from people experiencing this disorder. This approach allows for early warnings to be given about the potential risk of developing eating disorder symptoms.
The eRisk competition is one of many challenges organized as part of the CLEF conference (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum), which since 2000 has been attracting scientists and specialists from around the world interested in the development of data processing and information retrieval technologies.
It is worth recalling that the Department of Information Systems is currently implementing the OpenFact research project, under which it is developing tools for automatic detection of fake news in Polish. In July 2024, the results of the OpenFact project were rated as the best in Poland by National Center for Research and Development for the second year in a row. Victory in the “eRisk 2024” competition, as well as the first place in this year’s international competition in the field of information credibility “CheckThat! 2024”, confirms that our team’s achievements are important at a global level.
The OpenFact project is financed by the National Center for Research and Development under the INFOSTRATEG I program “Advanced information, telecommunications and mechatronic technologies”.