A Deep Learning Approach Combining CNN and Bi-LSTM with SVM Classifier for Arabic Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Deep learning models have recently been proven to be successful in various natural language processing tasks, including sentiment analysis. Conventionally, a deep learning model’s architecture includes a feature extraction layer followed by a fully connected layer used to train the model parameters and classification task. In this paper, we employ a deep learning model with modified architecture that combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) for feature extraction, with Support Vector Machine (SVM) for Arabic sentiment classification. In particular, we use a linear SVM classifier that utilizes the embedded vectors obtained from CNN and Bi-LSTM for polarity classification of Arabic reviews. The proposed method was tested on three publicly available datasets. The results show that the method achieved superior performance than the two baseline algorithms of CNN and SVM in all datasets.