A hybrid transformer and attention based recurrent neural network for robust and interpretable sentiment analysis of tweets

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal tool in understanding public opinion, consumer behavior, and social trends, underpinning applications ranging from market research to political analysis. However, existing sentiment analysis models frequently encounter challenges related to linguistic diversity, model generalizability, explainability, and limited availability of labeled datasets. To address these shortcomings, we propose the Transformer and Attention-based Bidirectional LSTM for Sentiment Analysis (TRABSA) model, a novel hybrid sentiment analysis framework that integrates transformer-based architecture, attention mechanism, and recurrent neural networks like BiLSTM. The TRABSA model leverages the powerful RoBERTa-based transformer model for initial feature extraction, capturing complex linguistic nuances from a vast corpus of tweets. This is followed by an attention mechanism that highlights the most informative parts of the text, enhancing the model's focus on critical sentiment-bearing elements. Finally, the BiLSTM networks process these refined features, capturing temporal dependencies and improving the overall sentiment classification into positive, neutral, and negative classes. Leveraging the latest RoBERTa-based transformer model trained on a vast corpus of 124M tweets, our research bridges existing gaps in sentiment analysis benchmarks, ensuring state-of-the-art accuracy and relevance. Furthermore, we contribute to data diversity by augmenting existing datasets with 411,885 tweets from 32 English-speaking countries and 7,500 tweets from various US states. This study also compares six word-embedding techniques, identifying the most robust preprocessing and embedding methodologies crucial for accurate sentiment analysis and model performance. We meticulously label tweets into positive, neutral, and negative classes using three distinct lexicon-based approaches and select the best one, ensuring optimal sentiment analysis outcomes and model efficacy. Here, we demonstrate that the TRABSA model outperforms the current seven traditional machine learning models, four stacking models, and four hybrid deep learning models, yielding notable gain in accuracy (94%) and effectiveness with a macro average precision of 94%, recall of 93%, and F1-score of 94%. Our further evaluation involves two extended and four external datasets, demonstrating the model's consistent superiority, robustness, and generalizability across diverse contexts and datasets. Finally, by conducting a thorough study with SHAP and LIME explainable visualization approaches, we offer insights into the interpretability of the TRABSA model, improving comprehension and confidence in the model's predictions. Our study results make it easier to analyze how citizens respond to resources and events during pandemics since they are integrated into a decision-support system. Applications of this system provide essential assistance for efficient pandemic management, such as resource planning, crowd control, policy formation, vaccination tactics, and quick reaction programs.