A deep learning approach for sentiment analysis in Spanish Tweets

Abstract

Sentiment Analysis at Document Level is a well-known problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP), being considered as a reference in NLP, over which new architectures and models are tested in order to compare metrics that are also referents in other issues. This problem has been solved in good enough terms for English language, but its metrics are still quite low in other languages. In addition, architectures which are successful in a language do not necessarily works in another. In the case of Spanish, data quantity and quality become a problem during data preparation and architecture design, due to the few labeled data available including not-textual elements (like emoticons or expressions). This work presents an approach to solve the sentiment analysis problem in Spanish tweets and compares it with the state of art. To do so, a preprocessing algorithm is performed based on interpretation of colloquial expressions and emoticons, and trivial words elimination. Processed sentences turn into matrices using the 3 most successful methods of word embeddings (GloVe, FastText and Word2Vec), then the 3 matrices merge into a 3-channels matrix which is used to feed our CNN-based model. The proposed architecture uses parallel convolution layers as k-grams, by this way the value of each word and their contexts are weighted, to predict the sentiment polarity among 4 possible classes. After several tests, the optimal tuple which improves the accuracy were <1, 2>. Finally, our model presents %61.58 and %71.14 of accuracy in InterTASS and General Corpus respectively. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.