Document Type : Original Research Paper

Author

Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Technology and Engineering, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran.

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Twitter is a microblogging platform for expressing assessments, opinions, and sentiments on different topics and events. While there have been several studies around sentiment analysis of tweets and their popularity in the form of the number of retweets, predicting the sentiment of first-order replies remained a neglected challenge. Predicting the sentiment of tweet replies is helpful for both users and enterprises. In this study, we define a novel problem; given just a tweet's text, the goal is to predict the overall sentiment polarity of its upcoming replies.
Methods: To address this problem, we proposed a graph convolutional neural network model that exploits the text's dependencies. The proposed model contains two parallel branches. The first branch extracts the contextual representation of the input tweets. The second branch extracts the structural and semantic information from tweets. Specifically, a Bi-LSTM network and a self-attention layer are used in the first layer for extracting syntactical relations, and an affective knowledge-enhanced dependency tree is used in the second branch for extracting semantic relations. Moreover, a graph convolutional network is used on the top of these branches to learn the joint feature representation. Finally, a retrieval-based attention mechanism is used on the output of the graph convolutional network for learning essential features from the final affective picture of tweets.
Results: In the experiments, we only used the original tweets of the RETWEET dataset for training the models and ignored the replies of the tweets in the training process. The results on three versions of the RETWEET dataset showed that the proposed model outperforms the LSTM-based models and similar state-of-the-art graph convolutional network models.
Conclusion: The proposed model showed promising results in confirming that by using only the content of a tweet, we can predict the overall sentiment of its replies. Moreover, the results showed that the proposed model achieves similar or comparable results with simpler deep models when trained on a public tweet dataset such as ACL 2014 dataset while outperforming both simple deep models and state-of-the-art graph convolutional deep models when trained on the RETWEET dataset. This shows the proposed model's effectiveness in extracting structural and semantic relations in the tweets.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

 

Publisher’s Note

JECEI Publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

 

Publisher

Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University


LETTERS TO EDITOR

Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering Innovations (JECEI) welcomes letters to the editor for the post-publication discussions and corrections which allows debate post publication on its site, through the Letters to Editor. Letters pertaining to manuscript published in JECEI should be sent to the editorial office of JECEI within three months of either online publication or before printed publication, except for critiques of original research. Following points are to be considering before sending the letters (comments) to the editor.


[1] Letters that include statements of statistics, facts, research, or theories should include appropriate references, although more than three are discouraged.

[2] Letters that are personal attacks on an author rather than thoughtful criticism of the author’s ideas will not be considered for publication.

[3] Letters can be no more than 300 words in length.

[4] Letter writers should include a statement at the beginning of the letter stating that it is being submitted either for publication or not.

[5] Anonymous letters will not be considered.

[6] Letter writers must include their city and state of residence or work.

[7] Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

CAPTCHA Image