Le Monde, 1 y. of comments - Ukraine Invasion

Notebook-as-article accessible here : https://matthieuvion.github.io/lmd_viz/

As a reader of Le Monde —and the comments section ;) I would regularly encounter familiar subscribers’ names. One in particular –more on that on the notebook, would manually keep track, count & cite “pro-russian” contributors, directly in the comments. That triggered my need to collect and perform some analysis in a bit more data-science oriented fashion.

You might also want to check the custom API & tools I used to build the 200k+ comments dataset —or simply download it, on the sibling repo : lmd_ukr (parquet, 40mb)

Scroll it fast (preview)

---

Cool things

---

• Source / analysis notebook (lmd_viz/playground.ipynb) is rendered as an html article: github.io/lmd_viz, via Quarto.
• Most of data operations are done using Polars instead of Pandas. Made sure to include a lot of annotations for re-use.
• Aggregations include cohort analysis and I like those viz.
• Curated and benchmarked a few SBert models for documents embedding + Semantic search efficiently via a Faiss index.

Facts

---

• Around 2% of Le Monde subscribers have engaged (as: commented) on the conflict
• The usual authors distribution shape : hardcore posters vs. the rest. 2 people have more than 2k comments in a single year.
• Honestly, I found that paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 to be very good baseline for semantic search on French content.