Attention-Based CNN and Bi-LSTM Model Based on TF-IDF and GloVe Word Embedding for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis (SA) detects people’s opinions from text engaging natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Recent research has shown that deep learning models, i.e., Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Transformer-based provide promising results for recognizing sentiment. Nonetheless, CNN has the advantage of extracting high-level features by using convolutional and max-pooling layers; it cannot efficiently learn a sequence of correlations. At the same time, Bidirectional RNN uses two RNN directions to improve extracting long-term dependencies. However, it cannot extract local features in parallel, and Transformer-based like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) are the computational resources needed to fine-tune, facing an overfitting problem on small datasets. This paper proposes a novel attention-based model that utilizes CNNs with LSTM (named ACL-SA). First, it applies a preprocessor to enhance the data quality and employ term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) feature weighting and pre-trained Glove word embedding approaches to extract meaningful information from textual data. In addition, it utilizes CNN’s max-pooling to extract contextual features and reduce feature dimensionality. Moreover, it uses an integrated bidirectional LSTM to capture long-term dependencies. Furthermore, it applies the attention mechanism at the CNN’s output layer to emphasize each word’s attention level. To avoid overfitting, the Guasiannoise and GuasianDroupout are adopted as regularization. The model’s robustness is evaluated on four English standard datasets, i.e., Sentiment140, US-airline, Sentiment140-MV, SA4A with various performance matrices, and compared efficiency with existing baseline models and approaches. The experiment results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.