Sentiment Classification of Code-Mixed Tweets using Bi-Directional RNN and Language Tags

Sentiment analysis tools and models have been developed extensively throughout the years, for European languages. In contrast, similar tools for Indian Languages are scarce. This is because, state-of-the-art pre-processing tools like POS tagger, shallow parsers, etc., are not readily available for Indian languages. Although, such working tools for Indian languages, like Hindi and Bengali, that are spoken by the majority of the population, are available, finding the same for less spoken languages like, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, is difficult. Moreover, due to the advent of social media, the multi-lingual population of India, who are comfortable with both English ad their regional language, prefer to communicate by mixing both languages. This gives rise to massive code-mixed content and automatically annotating them with their respective sentiment labels becomes a challenging task. In this work, we take up a similar challenge of developing a sentiment analysis model that can work with English-Tamil code-mixed data. The proposed work tries to solve this by using bi-directional LSTMs along with language tagging. Other traditional methods, based on classical machine learning algorithms have also been discussed in the literature, and they also act as the baseline systems to which we will compare our Neural Network based model. The performance of the developed algorithm, based on Neural Network architecture, garnered precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.59, 0.66, and 0.58 respectively.