Reddit_AI_Topic_Analysis

Unveiling Trends in AI Ethics: Exploring the Ethical Dimensions of AI, Prepared for SICSS 2023 - Tor Vergata

Co-contributors to this project are Yawri Carr and Genevieve Smith.

It was prepared as final project for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences at Tor Vergata, Rome. The project covers how to retrieve relevant topics in Reddit's AI & Ethics subreddit.

Main Research Questions

• What topics in AI ethics are most prevalent?
• How do these topics change over time?

Main Findings

• Seems to be a possible relationship between current events in AI and the sentiment of posts in the thread;
• Good opportunity to use transformers to unbias the topic modeling, however, too many topics were chosen.

Limitations

• Limited amount of data;
• Outdated chats;
• Difficult to map events to the posts in the subreddit.

Overview of the repo's organisation

The R script covers scrapping the posts from the subreddit, preprocessing them and performing a sentiment analysis and topic modeling. The Jupyter Notebook looks into using a Hugging Face transformer (bart-large-mnli) and how this could improve our findings from the topic modeling.