Text2Plot: Sentiment Analysis by Creating 2D Plot Representations of Texts

Abstract

We introduce a novel approach for generating 2D RGB color images with a plot from the micro text (tweet) to be used for the overall polarity classification process of sentiment analysis. Researchers generally use word embedding and external resource‐based embedding techniques for text preprocessing of sentiment analysis through machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing approaches. We sought to identify alternative ways to represent tweets for text classification. According to the experimental results, using the new ‘Text2Plot’ representation method could increase F1 scores by 27.2% for Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), 10.3% for support vector machine, and 4.4% for random forest models compared to using simple vectors as features for sentiment analysis. Hence, we propose this new method as a useful text representation approach for sentiment analysis, natural language processing tasks, and image processing problems. © 2021 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.