Social media platforms such as Twitter have evolved into a vast information sharing platform, allowing people from a variety of backgrounds and expertise to share their opinions on numerous events such as terrorism, narcotics and many other social issues. People sometimes misuse the power of social media for their agendas, such as illegal trades and negatively influencing others. Because of this, sentiment analysis has won the interest of a lot of researchers to widely analyze public opinion for social media monitoring. Several benchmark datasets for sentiment analysis across a range of domains have been made available, especially for high-resource languages. A few datasets are available for low-resource Indian languages like Hindi, such as movie reviews and product reviews, which do not address the current need for social media monitoring. In this paper, we address the challenges of sentiment analysis in Hindi and socially relevant domains by introducing a balanced corpus annotated with the sentiment classes, viz. positive, negative and neutral. To show the effective usage of the dataset, we build several deep learning based models and establish them as the baselines for further research in this direction.

Deep learning models have been proven vulnerable towards small imperceptible perturbed input, known as adversarial samples, which are indiscernible by humans. Initial attacks in Natural Language Processing perturb characters or words in sentences using heuristics and synonyms-based strategies, resulting in grammatical incorrect or out-of-context sentences. Recent works attempt to generate contextual adversarial samples using a masked language model, capturing word relevance using leave-one-out (LOO). However, they lack the design to maintain the semantic coherency for aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks. Moreover, they focused on resource-rich languages like English. We present an attack algorithm for the ABSA task by exploiting model explainability techniques to address these limitations. It does not require access to the training data, raw access to the model, or calibrating a new model. Our proposed method generates adversarial samples for a given aspect, maintaining more semantic coherency. In addition, it can be generalized to low-resource languages, which are at high risk due to resource scarcity. We show the effectiveness of the proposed attack using automatic and human evaluation. Our method outperforms the state-of-art methods in perturbation ratio, success rate, and semantic coherence.

Nowadays, the spread of Internet memes on online social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter is very fast. Analyzing the sentiment of memes can provide various useful insights. Meme sentiment classification is a new area of research that is not explored yet. Recently SemEval provides a dataset for meme sentiment classification. As this dataset is highly imbalanced, we extend this dataset by annotating new instances and use a sampling strategy to build a meme sentiment classifier. We propose a multi-modal framework for meme sentiment classification by utilizing textual and visual features of the meme. We found that for meme sentiment classification, only textual or only visual features are not sufficient. Our proposed framework utilizes textual as well as visual features together. We propose to use the attention mechanism to improve meme classification performance. Our proposed framework achieves macro F1 and accuracy of 34.23 and 50.02, respectively. It increases the accuracy by 6.77 and 7.86 compared to only textual and visual features, respectively.

Due to the phenomenal growth of online content in recent time, sentiment analysis has attracted attention of the researchers and developers. A number of benchmark annotated corpora are available for domains like movie reviews, product reviews, hotel reviews, etc.The pervasiveness of social media has also lead to a huge amount of content posted by users who are misusing the power of social media to spread false beliefs and to negatively influence others. This type of content is coming from the domains like terrorism, cybersecurity, technology, social issues, etc. Mining of opinions from these domains is important to create a socially intelligent system to provide security to the public and to maintain the law and order situations. To the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available tweet corpora for such pervasive domains. Hence, we firstly create a multi-domain tweet sentiment corpora and then establish a deep neural network based baseline framework to address the above mentioned issues. Annotated corpus has Cohen’s Kappa measurement for annotation quality of 0.770, which shows that the data is of acceptable quality. We are able to achieve 84.65% accuracy for sentiment analysis by using an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit(GRU).