Text Embeddings and Clustering for Characterizing Online Communities on Reddit

This work analyses Reddit, the largest public, topic-centered social forum. In the experiments, contextualized text embeddings, obtained using DistilBERT, represented subreddit content. Next, clustering was performed, using an unsupervised K-means algorithm and evaluated with multiple clustering metrics. The obtained clusters were analyzed. Moreover, changes of cluster structure, between 2019 and 2022 have been examined.