HOPE: Hybrid Optimized Parallel Encoding with Supervised and Unsupervised Semantic Fusion for Depression Symptom Detection

AbstractTimely detection of depression symptoms is essential for early intervention, and the continuous stream of user-generated content on social media provides an ideal source for this purpose. To address this challenge, we propose **HOPE**, a **H**ybrid **O**ptimized **P**arallel **E**ncoding framework that combines supervised symptom relevance signals with unsupervised intrinsic semantic clustering. This parallel design enables robust symptom detection under limited labeled data and introduces a distinctive semantic-similarity perspective with automatic class-anchor adjustment. We also propose an optimized hybrid semantic fusion mechanism to combine supervised and unsupervised scores through a learnable module. We evaluate our system on multiple benchmark datasets and surpass previous approaches, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting fine-grained symptoms and early warning of mental health risk. Source code is available at https://github.com/candleMind/hope.