Deep Learning-based Sentiment Analysis of Facebook Data: The Case of Turkish Users

Sentiment analysis (SA) is an essential task for many domains where it is crucial to know users' public opinion about events, products, brands, politicians and so on. Existing works on SA have concentrated on English texts including Twitter feeds and user reviews on hotels, movies and products. On the other hand, Facebook, as an online social network (OSN), has attracted quite limited attention from the research community. Among these, SA work on Turkish text obtained from OSNs are extremely scarce. In this paper, our aim is to perform SA on public Facebook data collected from Turkish user accounts. Our study differs from existing studies in terms of the data set scale, the natural language of the texts in the data set and the extent of experimental analyses that include both machine learning and deep learning techniques. We extensively report not only the results of different learning models involving SA but also statistical distribution of metadata of user activities across various user attributes (e.g. gender and age). Our experimental results indicate that recurrent neural networks achieve the best accuracy (i.e. 0.916) with word embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best result for SA on Facebook data in the context of the Turkish language.