Hybrid Perception Analysis of World Leaders in Reddit using Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the branch of Artificial Intelligence that deals with the interpretation of human speech. NLP is a vast area of study that is continually being developed each day, with active research happening worldwide. The development of NLP algorithms is of utmost importance to the advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence. With the increasing popularity of social media and the number of hours spent on social media multiplying, people share their opinion on a wide range of topics and issues. This sudden burst of data generated by social media platforms contains a massive potential when combined with state-of-the-art NLP models, it can be leveraged to our advantage. This work builds a dataset of user comments on the top posts about political leaders on Reddit, using Reddit’s API. On Reddit, extensive discussions on various topics occur daily. The end goal of this work is to rank the chosen world leaders based on their likability. To find the general likability of a public personality, we try to classify the comments collected from Reddit using Sentiment Analysis. This paper employs state-of-the-art NLP algorithms such as Flair, DistilBERT, and Text Blob Analysis, and combines the results to get a better final rank of the world leaders.