A Novel Sentimental Analysis for Response to Natural Disaster on Twitter Data

Abstract

The response to a natural disaster ultimately depends on credible and real-time information regarding impacted people and areas. Nowadays, social media platforms such as Twitter have emerged as the primary and fastest means of disseminating information. Due to the massive, imprecise, and redundant information on Twitter, efficient automatic sentiment analysis (SA) plays a crucial role in enhancing disaster response. This paper proposes a novel methodology to efficiently perform SA of Twitter data during a natural disaster. The tweets during a natural calamity are biased toward the negative polarity, producing imbalanced data. The proposed methodology has reduced the misclassification of minority class samples through the adaptive synthetic sampling technique. A binary modified equilibrium optimizer has been used to remove irrelevant and redundant features. The k-nearest neighbor has been used for sentiment classification with the optimized value of k. The nine datasets on natural disasters have been used for evaluation. The performance of the proposed methodology has been validated using the Friedman mean rank test against nine state-of-the-art techniques, including two optimized, one transfer learning, one deep learning, two ensemble learning, and three baseline classifiers. The results show the significance of the proposed methodology through the average improvement of 6.9%, 13.3%, 20.2%, and 18% for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively, as compared to nine state-of-the-art techniques.