Sentiment Classification of Tweets with Explicit Word Negations and Emoji Using Deep Learning

Abstract

The widespread use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn have had a huge impact on daily human interactions and decision-making. Owing to Twitter's widespread acceptance, users can express their opinions/sentiments on nearly any issue, ranging from public opinion, a product/service, to even a specific group of people. Sharing these opinions/sentiments results in a massive production of user content known as tweets, which can be assessed to generate new knowledge. Corporate insights, government policy formation, decision-making, and brand identity monitoring all benefit from analyzing the opinions/sentiments expressed in these tweets. Even though several techniques have been created to analyze user sentiments from tweets, social media engagements include negation words and emoji elements that, if not properly pre-processed, would result in misclassification. The majority of available pre-processing techniques rely on clean data and machine learning algorithms to annotate sentiment in unlabeled texts. In this study, we propose a text pre-processing approach that takes into consideration negation words and emoji characteristics in text data by translating these features into single contextual words in tweets to minimize context loss. The proposed preprocessor was evaluated on benchmark Twitter datasets using four deep learning algorithms: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The results showed that LSTM performed better than the approaches already discussed in the literature, with an accuracy of 96.36%, 88.41%, and 95.39%. The findings also suggest that pre-processing information like emoji and explicit word negations aids in the preservation of sentimental information. This appears to be the first study to classify sentiments in tweets while accounting for both explicit word negation conversion and emoji translation.