Sentiment Analysis with Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study on a Decade of Sinhala Language Facebook Data

TL;DR

This study compares various deep learning models for Sinhala sentiment analysis using a decade of Facebook data, identifying the best model and demonstrating Facebook reactions' effectiveness in sentiment prediction.

Contribution

It introduces a benchmark for Sinhala sentiment analysis and shows that a 3-layer Bidirectional LSTM outperforms existing models on this task.

Findings

Bidirectional LSTM achieved an F1 score of 84.58%.

Capsule B model scored 82.04% F1.

All tested models scored above 75%, indicating Facebook reactions are effective for sentiment prediction.

Abstract

The relationship between Facebook posts and the corresponding reaction feature is an interesting subject to explore and understand. To achieve this end, we test state-of-the-art Sinhala sentiment analysis models against a data set containing a decade worth of Sinhala posts with millions of reactions. For the purpose of establishing benchmarks and with the goal of identifying the best model for Sinhala sentiment analysis, we also test, on the same data set configuration, other deep learning models catered for sentiment analysis. In this study we report that the 3 layer Bidirectional LSTM model achieves an F1 score of 84.58% for Sinhala sentiment analysis, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model; Capsule B, which only manages to get an F1 score of 82.04%. Further, since all the deep learning models show F1 scores above 75% we conclude that it is safe to claim that Facebook reactions are suitable to predict the sentiment of a text.