RoBERTa-LSTM: A Hybrid Model for Sentiment Analysis With Transformer and Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of technology, social media has become more and more common in human daily life. Social media is a platform for people to express their feelings, feedback, and opinions. To understand the sentiment context of the text, sentiment analysis plays the role to determine whether the sentiment of the text is positive, negative, neutral or any other personal feeling. Sentiment analysis is prominent from the perspective of business or politics where it highly impacts the strategic decision making. The challenges of sentiment analysis are attributable to the lexical diversity, imbalanced dataset and long-distance dependencies of the texts. In view of this, a data augmentation technique with GloVe word embedding is leveraged to synthesize more lexically diverse samples by similar word vector replacements. The data augmentation also focuses on the oversampling of the minority classes to mitigate the imbalanced dataset problems. Apart from that, the existing sentiment analysis mostly leverages sequence models to encode the long-distance dependencies. Nevertheless, the sequence models require a longer execution time as the processing is done sequentially. On the other hand, the Transformer models require less computation time with parallelized processing. To that end, this paper proposes a hybrid deep learning method that combines the strengths of sequence model and Transformer model while suppressing the limitations of sequence model. Specifically, the proposed model integrates Robustly optimized BERT approach and Long Short-Term Memory for sentiment analysis. The Robustly optimized BERT approach maps the words into a compact meaningful word embedding space while the Long Short-Term Memory model captures the long-distance contextual semantics effectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model outshines the state-of-the-art methods by achieving F1-scores of 93%, 91%, and 90% on IMDb dataset, Twitter US Airline Sentiment dataset, and Sentiment140 dataset, respectively.