Sentiment Analysis of Dravidian Code Mixed Data

Abstract

This paper presents the methodologies implemented while classifying Dravidian code-mixed comments according to their polarity. With datasets of code-mixed Tamil and Malayalam available, three methods are proposed - a sub-word level model, a word embedding based model and a machine learning based architecture. The sub-word and word embedding based models utilized Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network along with language-specific preprocessing while the machine learning model used term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization along with a Logistic Regression model. The sub-word level model was submitted to the the track ‘Sentiment Analysis for Dravidian Languages in Code-Mixed Text’ proposed by Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation in 2020 (FIRE 2020). Although it received a rank of 5 and 12 for the Tamil and Malayalam tasks respectively in the FIRE 2020 track, this paper improves upon the results by a margin to attain final weighted F1-scores of 0.65 for the Tamil task and 0.68 for the Malayalam task. The former score is equivalent to that attained by the highest ranked team of the Tamil track.