Enhancing Sentiment Analysis on Social Media: Integrating Text and Metadata for Refined Insights

Abstract

Sentiment analysis has gained prominence in the digital era, particularly within social media contexts. This study explores the integration of metadata, such as reposts, favorites, or followers, alongside textual information for sentiment analysis. A dataset of posts in Spanish is created, filtering by a set of keywords (a total of 17) of interest to us. A total of 3,962 posts were collected along with their metadata. Then, they have been manually classified as positive, negative, and neutral, and processed. The research studies and compares different models like LightGBM, BERT, and a hybrid model combining BERT outputs with metadata. Evaluation metrics, such as F1-score and precision, were employed, revealing that the hybrid model achieved the highest F1-score of 69.4%, showcasing the effectiveness of merging text comprehension capabilities with contextual metadata. While the incorporation of metadata enhanced overall sentiment classification, precision varied across sentiment classes, with notable improvements in neutral and positive sentiments, over 16% and 8% respectively.