Sentiment analysis of the Hamas-Israel war on YouTube comments using deep learning

Abstract

Sentiment analysis aims to classify text based on the opinion or mentality expressed in a situation, which can be positive, negative, or neutral. Therefore, in the world, a lot of opinions are available on various social media sites, which must be gathered and analyzed to assess the general public’s opinion. Finding and monitoring comments, as well as manually extracting the information contained in them, is a difficult task due to the vast diversity of ideas on YouTube. Identifying public opinion on war topics is crucial for offering insights to opposing sides based on popular opinion and emotions about the ongoing war. To address the gap, we build a model on YouTube comment sentiment analysis of the Hamas-Israel war to determine public opinion. In this study, we address the gaps by developing a deep learning-based approach for sentiment analysis. We have collected 24,360 comments from popular YouTube News Channels including BBC, WION, Aljazeera, and others about the Hamas-Israel War using YouTube API and Google spreadsheet and labeled them by linguistic experts into three classes: positive, negative, and neutral. Then, textual comments were preprocessed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and features were extracted using Word2vec, FastText, and GloVe. Moreover, we have used the SMOTE data balancing technique and used different data splits, but the 80/20 train-test split ratio has the highest accuracy. For classification model building, commonly used classification algorithms LSTM, Bi-LSTM, GRU, and Hybrid of CNN and Bi-LSTM were applied, and their performance is compared. As a result, the Hybrid of CNN and Bi-LSTM with Word2vec achieved the highest performance with 95.73% accuracy for comments classifications.