Reddi2Listen

As university students, we know the importance of well-thought out mental health initiatives. Universities administrations often try to help the situation, but miss the mark with their approach. We think the best way to create initiatives for students is by listening to what they have to say. We found that one of the more popular platforms for posts related to mental health issues is reddit, due to the anonymity and specificity of the community.

Using a reddit bot and PRAW, we were able to scrape the most recent posts from /r/uwaterloo (the Canadian university subreddit with the most subscribers). We then used Azure Cognitive services to perform sentiment analysis on the posts, and isolated only those more likely to be negative. Using keyword analysis, we found the most common phrases students used in their negative posts. This data directly helps universities adjust their initiatives to alleviate the stress caused in those areas.

Our challenges included us being unable to integrate topic modelling in the last step, which would have allowed us to group keywords by themes and therefore let the universities know which general areas of student life cause the most stress. We hope to add this feature in the future.

Built With

• c#-python-azure-praw-pandas