NLP project #1: All they need is a nap

A week before Australian Mothers' Day, I was constantly seeing the posts titled something like "What does your mom really want?" - and so many of them, in my view, completely missed the point! As a mom, I felt that I was not alone in NOT wanting a new kettle. I decided to test my hypothesis and analyse some Reddit data.

Long story short, it turned out that moms want rest (as well as "peace and quiet" and "time alone")! This is a breakdown of the topics mentioned in the 494 Reddit comments on the "What moms really want for Mothers Day" post.

"Gift" is among the top three themes here but close reading of the results shows that the gifts the respondents talked about were often intangible, or the response was just a joke:

This example shows the complexity of such an NLP task and invites further analysis with more thought given to how to detect jokes and avoid misclassification of responses.

Besides, some sequences were assigned to an obviously wrong label:

The example above shows that, most likely, the threshold of 0.6 is too low, and it may be worth experimenting with its value. At the same time, such responses may be simply filtered out at the preprocessing stage which was not included in this experiment.

Finally, the list of labels is not perfect and requires editing: for example, in the next iteration I would probably remove the "no decision making" as many other labels like "time alone" or "rest" and "nap" implies no decision making: indeed, you cannot make decisions while sleeping!

All in all, it was a fun experiment and I would definitely get back to it and improve the process. Here is my public notebook containing code and some resulting visualisations of the results.

what_moms_want

What moms really want In the week before Australia’s Mothers Day, I came across so many articles on what moms want that seemed to completely miss the point. As a mom, I had a strong feeling that I am

Deepnotekatyamatya

I am yet to learn how to integrate Tableau visualisations into this blog but meanwhile I invite you to follow this link to see the interactive dashboard where you can play with the visualisation and check individual responses in each of the classes and perhaps get some inspiration for the next Mothers Day or some other special day to spoil a mom in your life!