A Pilot Rule-Based Operationalization of Conversational Objectives and Opening Strategies in Reddit Relationship-Help Posts

Mariia Yakovleva

Abstract: This paper presents a pilot rule-based study of how people describe upcoming difficult romantic conversations in online relationship-help posts. Using submission-level Reddit data, the study tests whether a transparent screening and pre-annotation pipeline can recover three things from such posts: the user’s likely conversational objective, the opening strategy they appear to be considering, and whether that strategy seems aligned with the underlying goal. Across 300,001 scanned posts, 332 candidate conversation-target narratives were extracted, and 91 likely on-target cases were retained for pilot analysis. The findings suggest that broad conversational objectives are partially recoverable, while robust goal-strategy mismatch detection remains substantially harder to operationalize.