Transfer Learning for Sentiment Classification Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Model

Abstract

Sentiment is currently one of the most emerging areas of research due to the large amount of web content coming from social networking websites. Sentiment analysis is a crucial process for recommending systems for most people. Generally, the purpose of sentiment analysis is to determine an author’s attitude toward a subject or the overall tone of a document. There is a huge collection of studies that make an effort to predict how useful online reviews will be and have produced conflicting results on the efficacy of different methodologies. Furthermore, many of the current solutions employ manual feature generation and conventional shallow learning methods, which restrict generalization. As a result, the goal of this research is to develop a general approach using transfer learning by applying the “BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)”-based model. The efficiency of BERT classification is then evaluated by comparing it with similar machine learning techniques. In the experimental evaluation, the proposed model demonstrated superior performance in terms of outstanding prediction and high accuracy compared to earlier research. Comparative tests conducted on positive and negative Yelp reviews reveal that fine-tuned BERT classification performs better than other approaches. In addition, it is observed that BERT classifiers using batch size and sequence length significantly affect classification performance.

Keywords

• BERT model
• sentiment analysis
• machine learning
• transformers
• transfer learning