RedditFeels: A Sentiment Analysis Tool for Reddit News

Project ID: 201912-12

Team Members:

• Timotius Kartawijaya (tak2151@columbia.edu)
• Fernando Troeman (ft2515@columbia.edu)
• Hritik Jain (hj2533@columbia.edu)

Overview:

Our web application is capable of processing and computing public sentiment towards companies or organizational entities. Such a product or service will be valuable in terms of informing investment decisions as well as evaluating brand recognition and loyalty. We have elected to work with data from the popular social media platform, Reddit, which houses a huge repository of user opinions and discussions on numerous wide-ranging topics and events. The resulting product is a web application that, given the name of a company specified by the user, extracts associated Reddit posts/comments and computes a sentiment score as well as other useful metrics to be output in the form of an analytics dashboard.

URL:

https://reddit-feels.herokuapp.com/

Technology Stack

User Interface:

• Flask
• JQuery
• D3.js / Chart.js

Backend/Database:

• Flask
• Spark
• VADER
• BigQuery

Folder and File Structure:

• static and templates contain all code needed for the user interface.
• analysis contain jupyter notebooks that are used for validation and analysis. Within the notebook contains the pre-trained SpaCy model and script to train said model, which determines whether a sentence is relevant to the entity.
• app.py is the entrypoint to the web app.
• Procfile used for Heroku deployment.

How to use locally:

1. pip install -r requirements.txt to install required packages.

2. A Google API Service Account Key is needed to access the BigQuery database containing a subset of the reddit data (more info: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/creating-managing-service-account-keys). To get a key, please contact one of the authors above.

3. run python app.py to start the application on your local server. Use --debug flag to use debug mode.