Fusing location and text features for sentiment classification
This work addresses sentiment analysis for social media users by improving classification with location data, but it is incremental as it builds on existing neural network methods.
The paper tackles sentiment classification of geo-tagged tweets by incorporating geo-location features with text features, achieving higher accuracy compared to using text features alone.
Geo-tagged Twitter data has been used recently to infer insights on the human aspects of social media. Insights related to demographics, spatial distribution of cultural activities, space-time travel trajectories for humans as well as happiness has been mined from geo-tagged twitter data in recent studies. To date, not much study has been done on the impact of the geolocation features of a Tweet on its sentiment. This observation has inspired us to propose the usage of geo-location features as a method to perform sentiment classification. In this method, the sentiment classification of geo-tagged tweets is performed by concatenating geo-location features and one-hot encoded word vectors as inputs for convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The addition of language-independent features in the form of geo-location features has helped to enrich the tweet representation in order to combat the sparse nature of short tweet message. The results achieved has demonstrated that concatenating geo-location features to one-hot encoded word vectors can achieve higher accuracy as compared to the usage of word vectors alone for the purpose of sentiment classification.