A Framework for Intelligent Navigation Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation on Reddit Posts About Opiates

Many people look to the internet for support and assistance when faced with issues in life, particularly when these issues are related to behaviors or conditions that are stigmatized within society, generally making open discussion difficult. In this study, we utilize the unique characteristics of the news aggregation and discussion internet forum, reddit, to demonstrate the potential for text mining as an intelligent content filtering and navigation framework; we use online discussion surrounding opiates as a case study. Topic modeling is used as a text mining approach to organize and discover hidden semantic structures within reddit posts, developing a representation of a post through the topics and the words which comprise them. These characterizations may act as an intelligent navigation system of an online community, providing users the ability to actively navigate through similar posts and identify dissimilar ones based on their specific interests.