Sentiment Analysis of the COVID-related r/Depression Posts
This work addresses public mental health concerns during the pandemic for researchers and potentially healthcare providers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed sentiments of COVID-related posts on r/Depression to identify common topics and their use in sentiment classification, finding that certain topics were more prevalent and could be used to classify sentiments, though no concrete numbers were provided.
Reddit.com is a popular social media platform among young people. Reddit users share their stories to seek support from other users, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Messages posted on Reddit and their content have provided researchers with opportunity to analyze public concerns. In this study, we analyzed sentiments of COVID-related messages posted on r/Depression. Our study poses the following questions: a) What are the common topics that the Reddit users discuss? b) Can we use these topics to classify sentiments of the posts? c) What matters concern people more during the pandemic? Key Words: Sentiment Classification, Depression, COVID-19, Reddit, LDA, BERT