Sentiment Analysis for Sinhala Language using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract: Due to the high impact of the fast-evolving fields of machine learning and deep learning, NLP tasks have further obtained comprehensive performances for highly resourced languages such as English and Chinese. However Sinhala, which is an under-resourced language with a rich morphology, has not experienced these advancements. For sentiment analysis, there exists only two previous research with deep learning approaches, which focused only on document-level sentiment analysis for the binary case. They experimented with only three types of deep learning models. In contrast, this paper presents a much comprehensive study on the use of standard sequence models such as RNN, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, as well as more recent state-of-the-art models such as hierarchical attention hybrid neural networks, and capsule networks. Classification is done at document-level but with more granularity by considering POSITIVE, NEGATIVE, NEUTRAL, and CONFLICT classes. A data set of 15059 Sinhala news comments, annotated with these four classes and a corpus consists of 9.48 million tokens are publicly released. This is the largest sentiment annotated data set for Sinhala so far.