Detection of extreme sentiments on social networks with BERT

Abstract

Online social networking platforms allow people to freely express their ideas, opinions, and emotions negatively or positively. Previous studies have examined sentiments on these platforms to study their behavior in different contexts and purposes. The mechanism of collecting public opinion information has attracted researchers to automatically classify the polarity of public opinions based on the use of concise language in messages, such as tweets, by analyzing social media data. In this paper, we extend the preceding work where an unsupervised approach to automatically detect extreme opinions/posts in social networks is proposed. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on five different social network and media datasets. In this work, we use a semi-supervised approach known as BERT to reevaluate the accuracy of our prior approach and the obtained classified dataset. The experiment proves that in these datasets, posts that were previously classified as negative or positive extreme are extremely negative or positive in many cases while using BERT. Furthermore, BERT shows the capability to classify the extreme sentiments when fine-tuned with an appropriate extreme sentiments dataset.