Sentiment Analysis of the COVID-related r/Depression Posts

TL;DR

This study analyzes COVID-related posts on Reddit's r/Depression to identify common topics, classify sentiments, and understand user concerns during the pandemic using LDA and BERT models.

Contribution

It introduces a sentiment analysis framework for COVID-related depression posts on Reddit, combining topic modeling and BERT-based classification to reveal user concerns.

Findings

Identified prevalent topics discussed by Reddit users during COVID-19.

Developed a sentiment classification method with BERT.

Revealed key concerns of users during the pandemic.

Abstract

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