Domain-specific sentiment analysis approaches for code-mixed social network data

Sentiment Analysis is one of the prominent research fields in Natural Language Processing because of its widespread real-world applications. Customer preferences, options and experiences can be analyzed through social media, reviews, blogs and other online social networking site data. However, due to increasing informal usage of local languages in social media platforms, multi-lingual or code-mixed data is fast becoming a common occurrence. Mixed code is generated when users use more than a single language in social network comments. Such data presents a significant challenge for applications using sentiment analysis and is yet to be fully explored by researchers. Existing sentiment analysis methods applied to monolingual social data are not suitable for code-mixed data due to the inconsistency in the grammatical structure in these sentences. In this paper, a novel method focused on performing effective sentiment analysis of bilingual sentences written in Hindi and English is proposed, that takes into account linguistic code switching and the grammatical transitions between the two considered languages. Experimental evaluation using real-world, code-mixed datasets obtained from Facebook showed that the proposed approach achieved very good accuracy and was also efficient performance-wise.