Find Supports for the Post about Mental Issues: More Than Semantic Matching

Mental-health-oriented question-answering (MH-QA) aims at retrieving an appropriate response for a question post involving mental health issues, which will be used to assist counsellors to reply to the support seeker. This task is different from the general QA task because many additional criteria such as emotions are involved. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Feature Graph Convolutional Network model (MF-GCN) to integrate not only semantic features, but also mental health related features and context features, to match question posts and responses. Different types of feature are exploited through multiple graph convolutional networks. A new dataset is constructed for MH-QA to evaluate our model. Experimental results show that our model with mental health features significantly outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art models without them.