Mapping Public Emotion in Digital Governance: A Comparative NLP Analysis of UK Immigration Discourse on Reddit

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Main Author: Sonar, Kartavya Satish
Format: Recurso digital
Published: Zenodo 2026
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author Sonar, Kartavya Satish
author_facet Sonar, Kartavya Satish
contents <p>This paper presents a systematic computational analysis of public discourse surrounding the United Kingdom's digital immigration infrastructure, focusing on the digital eVisa and the Biometric Residence Permit (BRP). We construct a corpus of 1,098 Reddit posts from seventeen communities and apply an NLP pipeline combining BERTopic-based topic modelling with a comparative evaluation of two Transformer-based emotion classifiers (GoEmotions and DistilRoBERTa). Ten coherent discourse themes are identified, with procedural friction accounting for over 55% of the corpus. We demonstrate that fine-grained emotion detection produces substantially richer policy-relevant insight than coarse classifiers, and introduce a fuzzy semantic matching layer linking discourse themes to UK legislative instruments. Results provide the first large-scale quantitative validation of concerns raised by civil society organisations about the UK's digital-by-default immigration programme.</p>
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spellingShingle Mapping Public Emotion in Digital Governance: A Comparative NLP Analysis of UK Immigration Discourse on Reddit
Sonar, Kartavya Satish
Natural language processing
Natural Language Processing
Sentiment Analysis
topic modelling
BERTopic
digital governance
Reddit
UK immigration
emotion detection
computational social science
<p>This paper presents a systematic computational analysis of public discourse surrounding the United Kingdom's digital immigration infrastructure, focusing on the digital eVisa and the Biometric Residence Permit (BRP). We construct a corpus of 1,098 Reddit posts from seventeen communities and apply an NLP pipeline combining BERTopic-based topic modelling with a comparative evaluation of two Transformer-based emotion classifiers (GoEmotions and DistilRoBERTa). Ten coherent discourse themes are identified, with procedural friction accounting for over 55% of the corpus. We demonstrate that fine-grained emotion detection produces substantially richer policy-relevant insight than coarse classifiers, and introduce a fuzzy semantic matching layer linking discourse themes to UK legislative instruments. Results provide the first large-scale quantitative validation of concerns raised by civil society organisations about the UK's digital-by-default immigration programme.</p>
title Mapping Public Emotion in Digital Governance: A Comparative NLP Analysis of UK Immigration Discourse on Reddit
topic Natural language processing
Natural Language Processing
Sentiment Analysis
topic modelling
BERTopic
digital governance
Reddit
UK immigration
emotion detection
computational social science
url https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19651532