Domain-specific sentiment analysis approaches for code-mixed social network data

In the past decades, sentiment analysis has become one of the most active research areas in natural language processing, data mining, web mining, and information retrieval. The great demand in everyday life and the factor of novelty coupled with the availability of data from social networks have served as strong motivation for research on sentiment-analysis. A number of technical problems, most of which had not been attempted before, either in the NLP or linguistics communities have also generated strong research interests in academia. Sentiment analysis, also called opin-ion mining, is the field of study that analyzes people’s opinions, sentiments, apprais-als, attitudes, and emotions toward entities and their attributes expressed in written text. The entities can be products, services, organizations, individuals, events, issues, or topics. The field represents a large problem space. It improves not only the field of natural language processing but also management, political science, economics, and sociology because all these areas are related to the thoughts of consumers and public. User-generated content is full of opinions, because the main reason why people post messages on social media platforms is to express their views and opinions, and therefore sentiment analysis is at the centre of social media analysis. It turned out that user messages often contain plenty of sarcastic expressions and ambiguous words. Within one opinion both positive and negative sentiments can be present. This also applies to negative particles, which do not always indicate a negative tone. This article investigates four challenges faced by researchers while conducting sentiment analysis, namely: sarcasm, negation, word ambiguity, and multipolarity. These aspects significantly affect the accuracy of the results when we determine a sentiment. Modern approaches to solving the problem are also covered. These are mainly machine learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), deep neural networks (DNN), long short-term memory (LTSM), recurrent neural network (RNN), support vector machines (SVM), etc.

This thesis examines the issue of ill-formed text (microtext) and shows its impact on sentiment analysis. The source of microtext is Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms. Words or phrases not in their standard language format like “lol” (laugh out loud), “c u 2nite” (see you tonight) and “plz” (please) are called out of vocabulary (OOV) terms. On the other hand, words or phrases in their standard forms, for example, “tonight”, “love”, or “talk to you later”, are called In Vocabulary (IV) terms. The motivation behind microtext normalization is its growing presence on both online and offline platforms. Microtext might appear to be an ill-formed text, which requires find-and-replace methods. Traditionally, in a Natural Language Processing (NLP) context, microtexts such as abbreviations and length shortening or extending are normalized, but phonemic and graphemic variation is often ignored. However, the features of microtext can be traced back to social, cognitive and geographic influences. To understand social media text, it is essential to develop a microtext normalization module for traditional and modern NLP models. The first section of this thesis focuses on combining unsupervised learning methods in 2 different chapters, 4 and 5. The first method includes lexicon creation to transform the most frequent microtexts and emoticons on social media and applies them to sentiment analysis. This method shows an accuracy increase of 4% when microtext normalization is applied before sentiment analysis. This method is extended with an application to a pre-trained chatbot to improve the chatbot’s understanding of microtext (social media slangs). This method shows a mean BLEU score of 0.8 for the SMS and Tweet dataset. The second method incorporates a phonetic based approach to transform any microtext into its phonetic equivalent before 1normalizing it. This method shows an accuracy improvement of 6% for sentiment analysis on SenticNet. The second part of the unsupervised learning is in Chapter 5, introducing the IPA-based method for microtext normalization and sentiment analysis. Epitran was used to transform a word to its International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) equivalent. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. There is a significant improvement in microtext normalization task and sentiment analysis over Soundex. The results also show that there is very little redundancy when words are transformed to phonetics in IPA. In addition, the accuracy of polarity detection using this method has an improvement over baseline by 5%. Chapter 6 discusses a simple sequence-to-sequence based Deep Learning method. As the language is dynamic, it is not easy to maintain the lexicon. Deep Learning alleviates the static lexicon with a probabilistic model to transform microtext into its standard form. The findings suggest that a semiotic class of microtext was easy to transform, whereas the phonetic class of microtext was not handled easily. The proposed model improves the pre-trained sentiment analysis model by 4%. We also introduce a corpus for English microtext normalization. The corpus contains microtext-containing sentences along with their correctly spelt sentences and their correct polarity. This dataset can tackle two NLP problems, i.e., microtext normalization and sentiment analysis. This corpus consists of 38% positive, 39.9% negative and 22.1% neutral. A pre-trained model shows an accuracy of 46.4 % on OOV text for sentiment analysis, showing considerable room for improvement. In summary, this thesis introduces several approaches to microtext normalization analysis and focuses on sentiment analysis application. Microtext cannot be thought of as a one-dimensional problem to NLP. It encapsulates many factors like regional (geographical), ethnic (national and racial), and social (class, age, gender, socioeconomic status and education), which cannot be ignored given the growing importance of social media in our daily life.

A Review on Reddit News Headlines with NLTK tool

An analysis of machine learning models for sentiment analysis of Tamil code-mixed data

Social media platforms have become indispensable channels for communication and interaction, offering a wealth of data that can provide valuable insights into public sentiments. However, analyzing sentiment on these platforms poses significant challenges due to the diverse and unstructured nature of user-generated content. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques struggle to accurately classify sentiments expressed through text, images, emoticons, and multimedia elements. Moreover, the informal and nuanced language used in Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) further complicates sentiment analysis. In response, this paper explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving sentiment analysis on social media. By leveraging Machine Learning (ML) algorithms trained on large datasets, AI can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of sentiment classification, providing decision-makers with actionable insights into the sentiment landscape of social media. Keywords: Social media, Sentiment analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Electronic Word of Mouth.

In the digital world, social media has become one of the most popular communication mediums that allow users to share their views on various topics in their social network. For example, Twitter users are allowed to share their thoughts on various topic by sending tweets with a maximum length of 140 characters. Hence, social media driven information contains opinions and sentiments on various topics of interest which are extremely useful for companies to design marketing strategies. Sentiment Analysis is widely used to assist people to understand the massive amount of data available online and identify the polarity of the topical based social media opinions. However, social media platforms’ users come from all over the world and have variation in terms of informal language and short notation used on social media platforms. Therefore, the identification on the polarity of topical social media has become more challenging and the accuracy on the polarity of topical social media opinions might be influenced. This paper investigates the effectiveness of applying different spelling correction algorithms, such as Levenshtein distance and Peter Norvig’s algorithm for spelling correction of unknown words found in social media such as Twitter, before carrying out sentiment analysis. The evaluation of spelling correction algorithms on sentiment analysis is carried out by comparing the polarities of manually annotated tweets with the polarities obtained from the sentiment analysis algorithm. Based on the results obtained, there are slight improvements in term of percentage of matched polarity, where 1.6% improvement by using the Levenshtein distance-based algorithm and 2.0% improvement by using the Peter Norvig’s algorithm.

Navigating Social Media in #Ophthalmology

The Impact of Arabic Part of Speech Tagging on Sentiment Analysis: A New Corpus and Deep Learning Approach

IntroductionSince the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), public safety measures, including social distancing and school closures, have been implemented, precipitating psychological difficulties and heightened online activities for adolescents. However, studies examining the impact of the pandemic on adolescent mental health and their coping strategies in Asian countries are limited. Further, most studies have used survey measures to capture mental health challenges so far. Accordingly, this study aimed to examine the psychological challenges South Korean adolescents experienced and their coping strategies during the pandemic using the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text mining (TM) technique on adolescents’ social media texts/posts.MethodsThe data were gathered from social media texts/posts such as online communities, Twitter, and personal blogs from January 1, 2019, to October 31, 2021. The 12,520,250 texts containing keywords related to adolescents’ common psychological difficulties reported during the pandemic, including self-harm, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), and insomnia, were analyzed by TM, NLP using information extraction, co-occurrence and sentiment analysis. The monthly frequency of the keywords and their associated words was also analyzed to understand the time trend.ResultsAdolescents used the word “self-harm” in their social media texts more frequently during the second wave of COVID-19 (August to September 2020). “Friends” was the most associated word with “self-harm.” While the frequency of texts with “Insomnia” stayed constant throughout the pandemic, the word “ADHD” was increasingly mentioned in social media. ADHD and insomnia were most frequently associated with ADHD medications and sleeping pills, respectively. Friends were generally associated with positive words, while parents were associated with negative words.ConclusionDuring COVID-19, Korean adolescents often expressed their psychological challenges on social media platforms. However, their coping strategies seemed less efficient to help with their difficulties, warranting strategies to support them in the prolonged pandemic era. For example, Korean adolescents shared psychological challenges such as self-harm with friends rather than their parents. They considered using medicine (e.g., sleeping pills and ADHD medication) as coping strategies for sleep and attention problems.

In the era of big data, natural language processing becomes an important research discipline, owing to the immense quantity of text documents and the progresses in machine learning. Natural language processing has been succesfully employed in many different areas, including machine translation, search engines, virtual assistants, spam filtering, question answering and sentiment analysis. Recent studies in the field of natural language processing indicate that word embedding based representation, in which words have been represented in dense spaces through fixed length vectors, can yield promising results. In this study, we evaluate the predictive performance of 36 word embedding based representation obtained by three word embedding methods (i.e., word2vec, fastText and DOC2vec), two basic weighting functions (i.e., inverse document frequency and smooth inverse document frequency) and three vector pooling schemes (namely, weighted sum, center based approach and delta rule). Experimental analysis indicates that word2vec based representation in conjunction with inverse document frequency based weighting and center based pooling, yields promising results for sentiment analysis in Turkish.

Deep learning has been very successful in the past decades, especially in Computer Vision and Speech Recognition fields. It has been also used successfully in the Natural Language Processing field because of the availability of an enormous amount of online text data, such as social networks and reviews websites, which have gained a lot of popularity and success in the past years. Sentiment Analysis is one of the hottest applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many researchers have done excellent work on Sentiment Analysis for English language. However, the amount of work on Sentiment Analysis for Arabic language is, in comparison, very limited due to the complexity of the Arabic language's morphology and orthography. Unlike the English language, Arabic has many different dialects which makes Sentiment Analysis for Arabic more difficult and challenging, especially when working on data collected from social networks, which is known to be unstructured and noisy. Most of the work that has been done on Sentiment Analysis of Arabic language, focused on using lexicons and basic machine learning models. In addition, most of the work has been done on small datasets because of the limited number of the available annotated datasets for Arabic language. This paper proposes state-of-the-art research for Sentiment Analysis of Arabic microblogging using new techniques, and a sophisticated Arabic text data preprocessing.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, sentiment analysis has been one of the most active research fields in natural language processing. Now sentiment analysis technology has not only achieved significant results in academia, but also has been widely used in practice. From business services to political campaigns, sentiment analysis is used in more and more fields. Sentiment analysis is essentially to dig out the user’s emotional attitude from the massive emotional natural language text data, and analyze the emotional dynamics of the text author through certain technical means. At present, there is almost no sentiment analysis in cross-media writing content, and it can rarely help cross-media writing vision to advance with the times and comprehensive improvement of writing ability to adapt to the current rapidly developing information society; the commonly used text media in the digital age are not. Then there is the only composition tool. Various new media appearing with the development of the ages continue to intervene in writing, and it is the general trend to cultivate media literacy in writing. The main content of this paper is the research on the emotional intensity of students’ Internet public Aiming at the shortcomings of the topic feature word selection in the sentiment tendency analysis of the students’ Internet public opinion, improvements have been made to facilitate the research on the sentiment intensity of the sentiment analysis of the students’ Internet public opinion. Sentiment analysis of students’ cross-media written text through an improved MapReduce combinator model.

Sentiment analysis is one of the major fields in natural language processing whose main task is to extract sentiments, opinions, attitudes, and emotions from a subjective text. And for its importance in decision making and in people's trust with reviews on web sites, there are many academic researches to address sentiment analysis problems. Deep Learning (DL) is a powerful Machine Learning (ML) technique that has emerged with its ability of feature representation and differentiating data, leading to state-of-the-art prediction results. In recent years, DL has been widely used in sentiment analysis, however, there is scarce in its implementation in the Arabic language field. Most of the previous researches address other languages like English. The proposed model tackles Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) by using a DL approach. ASA is a challenging field where Arabic language has a rich morphological structure more than other languages. In this work, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as a deep neural network has been used for training the model combined with word embedding as a first hidden layer for features extracting. The results show an accuracy of about 82% is achievable using DL method.

Learning the inherent meaning of a word in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has motivated researchers to represent a word at various levels of abstraction, namely character-level, morpheme-level, and subword-level vector representations. Syllable-Aware Word Embedding (SAWE) can effectively handle agglutinative and fusion-based NLP tasks. However, research attempts on assessing the SAWE on such extrinsic NLP tasks has been scanty, especially for low-resource languages in the context of code-mixing with English. A model to learn SAWE to extract semantics at fine-grained subunits of a word is proposed in this article, and the representative ability of the embeddings is assessed through sentiment analysis of code-mixed Telugu-English review corpora. Multilingual societies and advancements in communication technologies have accounted for the prolific usage of mixed data, which renders the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) sentiment analysis models developed based on monolingual data ineffective. Social media users in the Indian subcontinent exhibit a tendency to mix English and their respective native language (using the phonetic form of English) in expressing their opinions or sentiments. A code-mixing scenario provides flexibility to borrow words from a foreign language, usage of shorthand notations, elongation of vowels, and usage of words without following syntactic/grammatical rules, which renders the sentiment analysis of code-mixed data challenging to perform. Deep neural architectures like Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit networks have been shown to be effective in solving several NLP tasks, such as sequence labeling, named entity recognition, and machine translation. In this article, a framework to perform sentiment analysis on a code-mixed Telugu-English review corpus is implemented. Both word embedding and SAWE are input to a unified deep neural network that contains a two-level Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory/Gated Recurrent Unit network with Softmax as the output layer. The proposed model leverages the advantages of both word embedding and SAWE, which enable the proposed model to outperform existing SOTA code-mixed sentiment analysis models on a Telugu-English code-mixed dataset of the International Institute of Information Technology–Hyderabad and a dataset curated by the authors. The improvement realized by the proposed model on these datasets is [3% increase in F1-score and 2% increase in accuracy] and [7% increase in F1-score and 5% in accuracy], respectively, in comparison with the best-performing SOTA model.

Sentiment analysis is crucial, in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Has applications in different areas. This study focuses on analyzing sentiments in massive open online course (MOOC) forums highlighting its importance in understanding how users interact and shaping educational strategies. The study presents a novel hybrid neural network model specifically tailored for sentiment analysis in MOOC forums. This innovative model combines word level and character level embeddings to handle the linguistic expressions commonly found in this context. The model architecture integrates bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers for word level embeddings and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for character level embeddings aiming to harness the strengths of both types of embeddings for a view of the linguistic used in MOOC forum posts. Notably this model achieves an accuracy rate of 93.11% showcasing its effectiveness, in sentiment analysis within MOOC forums. This research contributes to sentiment analysis within the context of online education.