Detecting Emotions in English and Arabic Tweets

Abstract

Assigning sentiment labels to documents is, at first sight, a standard multi-label classification task. Many approaches have been used for this task, but the current state-of-the-art solutions use deep neural networks (DNNs). As such, it seems likely that standard machine learning algorithms, such as these, will provide an effective approach. We describe an alternative approach, involving the use of probabilities to construct a weighted lexicon of sentiment terms, then modifying the lexicon and calculating optimal thresholds for each class. We show that this approach outperforms the use of DNNs and other standard algorithms. We believe that DNNs are not a universal panacea and that paying attention to the nature of the data that you are trying to learn from can be more important than trying out ever more powerful general purpose machine learning algorithms.