How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
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Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#2420 blaze it faggot
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#3This seems more like a quick intro to some Google BigQuery and NLP capabilities using a keyword that will attract readers. Not a bad thing, but anyone expecting analysis of the topic in the headline should know it's really not about that.
However, it worked on me, I'll probably give these tools a spin in the near future.
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#4This seems more like a quick intro to some Google BigQuery and NLP capabilities using a keyword that will attract readers. Not a bad thing, but anyone expecting analysis of the topic in the headline should know it's really not about that. However, it worked on me, I'll probably give these tools a spin in the near future.
I was hoping to see a little more analysis as well. We did a study[1] about people moving for marijuana and we were surprised to find people were fairly open about discussing the topic. But I'd be very curious to see more about how conversations online are forming around marijuana.
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#5A quick note about using natural language/sentiment APIs: trained machine learning models must be used apples-to-apples on similar datasets; for example, you can’t accurately perform Twitter sentiment analysis on a dataset using a model trained on professional movie reviews since Tweets do not follow AP Style guidelines. (e.g. for some reason, training Python's NLTK on the IMDb movie review dataset to predict the sentiment of Donald Trump's tweets is a oddly common Hello World, even though the results are misleading and may cause confirmation bias)
Reddit comments are very idiosyncratic, and in this particular case, even moreso than usual. As a result, I am skeptical of trusting the output of such APIs as gospel, even one trained on massive datasets. (however, training a model on a Reddit-only dataset might be interesting, and is an idea I have in the pipeline.)
Last year, spaCy trained a model, sense2vec, on the Reddit dataset and got interesting results: https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#6Decent intro to natural language processing, but scientifically rubbish. I think using "cannabis" and "marajuana" skews heavily towards advocacy and serious discussion, since general chat about weed will use words such as, well, weed. Or pot, or hash, or herbs, or the maple leaf emoji, or a link to /r/trees. The problem with natural language processing on drugs is that the names people use for drugs are specifically chosen to be easily-confused with another, innocuous usage. That's the entire point of street names - to hide the fact that you're talking about drugs. I think you would need some kind of AI leagues ahead of our technology to accurately analyse people colloquially chatting about any drug, let alone one as popular and ubiquitous as weed.
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#7Not directly related, but the podcast On The Media recently did a great episode on the origins of the war on drugs. One thing I didn't know? The word "marijuana" was actively popularized during the early days of the war on drugs to make the plant feel like a foreign import, despite the fact that it grew wild throughout the states.
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#8Decent intro to natural language processing, but scientifically rubbish. I think using "cannabis" and "marajuana" skews heavily towards advocacy and serious discussion, since general chat about weed will use words such as, well, weed. Or pot, or hash, or herbs, or the maple leaf emoji, or a link to /r/trees. The problem with natural language processing on drugs is that the names people use for drugs are specifically…
What may be interesting is to use cosine similarity between the embeddings of these words to see if synonyms can be accurately identified.
Awhile ago, SpaCy set up a demo doing just that on the Reddit dataset:
https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=cannabis&sense=au...
https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=marijuana&sense=a...
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#9Funny how marijuana was most mentioned with Donald Trump. I know the /r/trees subreddit thought Trump would be good for recreational Marijuana but doesn't look like that is true. The Trump subreddit (The_Donald) was also extremely pro marijauna and often boasted that Trump was better for legal marijuana than Clinton. Then enter Jefferey Bouraguard Sessions III.
Re: How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
#10Funny how marijuana was most mentioned with Donald Trump. I know the /r/trees subreddit thought Trump would be good for recreational Marijuana but doesn't look like that is true. The Trump subreddit (The_Donald) was also extremely pro marijauna and often boasted that Trump was better for legal marijuana than Clinton. Then enter Jefferey Bouraguard Sessions III.
I don't really understand why people would think Trump would be supportive of any kind of intoxicant. His older brother was an alcoholic and died before their dad (which depending on the source you're reading, had a big impact on him).