Depression Detection on Indonesian Social Media Using Fine-Tuned IndoBERT and SVM

Authors

  • Donny Amanullah Putra Rahman Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro, Semarang, Indonesia
  • Muhamad Akrom Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro, Semarang, Indonesia
  • Muhammad Naufal Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro, Semarang, Indonesia

DOI:

10.33395/sinkron.v10i3.16294

Keywords:

Depression detection, IndoBERT, Indonesian language, Social media, Support vector machine

Abstract

Depression has become a major mental health issue in Indonesia, where approximately 167 million of the country’s 273 million citizens actively use social media platforms such as X (Twitter). The informal writing style, code-mixing, and linguistic variability in Indonesian tweets create significant challenges for automated depression detection systems. This study evaluates a fine-tuned IndoBERT model combined with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for detecting depression-related indications from Indonesian-language tweets. A total of 10,082 Indonesian tweets were collected and labeled into two categories: Terindikasi Depresi and Tidak Terindikasi; after deduplication, 3,874 unique tweets were used for modeling. Two scenarios were compared: (1) a fine-tuned IndoBERT model, and (2) fine-tuned IndoBERT CLS embeddings with a linear SVM classifier. The fine-tuned IndoBERT model achieved 73.20% accuracy (AUC-ROC = 0.8212), while the hybrid approach achieved a marginally higher 73.71% accuracy (AUC-ROC = 0.8088); a McNemar’s test found this difference not statistically significant (p = 0.86). Both models outperformed five traditional TF-IDF-based baselines (best: 70.36%) on the same held-out test set. The hybrid model required only 0.01 MB of storage versus 475.24 MB for the full fine-tuned model. Given statistically equivalent accuracy, combining fine-tuned IndoBERT embeddings with SVM offers substantially lower storage requirements at no measurable cost in classification performance, making it a promising, resource-efficient approach for depression detection on Indonesian social media.

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How to Cite

Rahman, D. A. P., Akrom, M. ., & Naufal, M. . (2026). Depression Detection on Indonesian Social Media Using Fine-Tuned IndoBERT and SVM. Sinkron : Jurnal Dan Penelitian Teknik Informatika, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.33395/sinkron.v10i3.16294

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): Article Research July 2026

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2026 Donny Amanullah Putra Rahman, Muhamad Akrom, Muhammad Naufal

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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