Sentiment Analysis of Text Reviews Using Lexicon-Enhanced Bert Embedding (LeBERT) Model with Convolutional Neural Network

Sentiment analysis has become an important area of research in natural language processing. This technique has a wide range of applications, such as comprehending user preferences in ecommerce feedback portals, politics, and in governance. However, accurate sentiment analysis requires robust text representation techniques that can convert words into precise vectors that represent the input text. There are two categories of text representation techniques: lexicon-based techniques and machine learning-based techniques. From research, both techniques have limitations. For instance, pre-trained word embeddings, such as Word2Vec, Glove, and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), generate vectors by considering word distances, similarities, and occurrences ignoring other aspects such as word sentiment orientation. Aiming at such limitations, this paper presents a sentiment classification model (named LeBERT) combining sentiment lexicon, N-grams, BERT, and CNN. In the model, sentiment lexicon, N-grams, and BERT are used to vectorize words selected from a section of the input text. CNN is used as the deep neural network classifier for feature mapping and giving the output sentiment class. The proposed model is evaluated on three public datasets, namely, Amazon products’ reviews, Imbd movies’ reviews, and Yelp restaurants’ reviews datasets. Accuracy, precision, and F-measure are used as the model performance metrics. The experimental results indicate that the proposed LeBERT model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models, with a F-measure score of 88.73% in binary sentiment classification.