Straits Times Comments Sentiment Bot

The Problem

Studies have shown that an intentional approach to reading good news can boost morale and lift up one's mood. However, people often find the need to constantly keep up with the latest news, whether it makes them feel good or not. Another study by Time has shown that people feel more stressed, anxious, and tired due to this behavior of keeping up with the news.

The Solution

The team feels that a deliberate separation of good news and bad news is key to helping a person choose what kind of news the person would like to read at a certain point in time. However, news outlets currently do not explicitly tell readers whether a piece of news is good or bad. Thus, we believe that community-driven sentiment is key in categorizing a piece of news. As such, we have conceptualized and implemented Straits Times Comments Sentiment Bot, a news aggregator that utilizes sentiment analysis of the community toward the latest news articles.

How Straits Times Comments Sentiment Bot works

Data is scraped from Facebook with facebook-scraper. Scraping is done once every 3 hours to reduce the chances of us from getting blocked by Facebook :P
We carry out sentiment analysis with vaderSentiment
UI is fully implemented on Telegram via a Telegram bot for simplicity and quick access for users