Sentiment Analysis in SemEval: A Review of Sentiment Identification Approaches

Social media platforms are becoming the foundations of social interactions including messaging and opinion expression. In this regard, Sentiment Analysis techniques focus on providing solutions to ensure the retrieval and analysis of generated data including sentiments, emotions, and discussed topics. International competitions such as the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) have attracted many researchers and practitioners with a special research interest in building sentiment analysis systems. In our work, we study top-ranking systems for each SemEval edition during the 2013-2021 period, a total of 658 teams participated in these editions with increasing interest over years. We analyze the proposed systems marking the evolution of research trends with a focus on the main components of sentiment analysis systems including data acquisition, preprocessing, and classification. Our study shows an active use of preprocessing techniques, an evolution of features engineering and word representation from lexicon-based approaches to word embeddings, and the dominance of neural networks and transformers over the classification phase fostering the use of ready-to-use models. Moreover, we provide researchers with insights based on experimented systems which will allow rapid prototyping of new systems and help practitioners build for future SemEval editions.

LSTM based models stability in the context of Sentiment Analysis for social media

Deep learning techniques have proven their effectiveness for Sentiment Analysis (SA) related tasks. Recurrent neural networks (RNN), especially Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM, have become a reference for building accurate predictive models. However, the models complexity and the number of hyperparameters to configure raises several questions related to their stability. In this paper, we present various LSTM models and their key parameters, and we perform experiments to test the stability of these models in the context of Sentiment Analysis.