Sinkron : Jurnal dan Penelitian Teknik Informatika
Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): Article Research July 2026

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

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)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jul 2026

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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Journal Info

Abbrev

sinkron

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Scope of SinkrOns Scientific Discussion 1. Machine Learning 2. Cryptography 3. Steganography 4. Digital Image Processing 5. Networking 6. Security 7. Algorithm and Programming 8. Computer Vision 9. Troubleshooting 10. Internet and E-Commerce 11. Artificial Intelligence 12. Data Mining 13. Artificial ...