A comparative study of machine learning models for sentiment analysis of transboundary rivers news media articles

Sentiment analysis of news media articles is essential for understanding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in transboundary rivers. However, it is not known which machine learning model(s) can best meet the requirement of sentiment analysis for transboundary rivers. This study presents a comparative examination of ten machine learning models commonly used in the field of text sentiment analysis, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Multilayer Perceptron, Long Short-Term Memory and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, for five-class sentiment classification of 9382 news articles (1977–2022) attending to transboundary water conflict and cooperation. By evaluating their performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model demonstrated good overall performance and prediction capabilities for news articles with conflictive sentiments. By comparing with the AFINN sentiment dictionary, BERT showed superior performance in the prediction and identification of conflictive sentiment labels. And by validating against historical water events in the three river basins, BERT performed best in the Indus River basin. The findings of this study hold significant implications for government agencies in transboundary rivers, allowing them to promptly assess and respond to public sentiment, thereby preventing water conflict and promoting water cooperation.