Discovering Changes in Birthing Narratives during COVID-19

We investigated whether, and if so how, birthing narratives written by new parents on Reddit changed during COVID-19 using natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning methods. Our results indicate that the presence of family members significantly decreased and themes related to induced labor significantly increased in the narratives during COVID-19. Our work builds upon recent research that analyze how new parents use Reddit to describe their birthing experiences.

Set up and activate the conda environment by running the following lines:

conda env create -f new_environment.yml
conda activate new_environment

Structure of Repo:

• data/ - all data is saved here. Our original Reddit data is saved in the original-reddit/ folder.
• results/ - all results and figures are saved here. We have 4 results folders: Corpus_Stats_Plots/, LIWC_Results/, Personas_Results/, and Topic_Modeling_Results/. Information about these folders are contained in their readmes.
• src/ - all coding files are saved here. Instructions to run the files to replicate results are contained in their respective readmes. Our methods included counting persona frequencies, conducting sentiment analysis, running LIWC on our corpus, and running statistical analyses such as t-tests and z-tests. We also computed 95% confidence intervals for some of our data to further support the statistical significance of our results.
• poster-winlp.pdf & Poster_Presentation.png - this work was presented as a poster at the Widening Natural Language Processing Workshop at the 2021 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference, in the Dominican Republic.
• arXiv paper can be found here: