Advancing Sentiment Analysis: Evaluating RoBERTa against Traditional and Deep Learning Models

This research evaluates the performance of various sentiment analysis models, including traditional machine learning approaches (Naive Bayes, KNN, CART), a deep learning model (LSTM), and the transformer-based model RoBERTa using an Amazon book reviews dataset. ROBERTa outperformed all other models, achieving an accuracy of 96.30% and an F1-score of 98.11%, underscoring its superior ability to process complex and semantically diverse textual data. Traditional models, while computationally efficient, demonstrated limitations in capturing nuanced textual relationships, and the LSTM model, although competitive, faced scalability challenges and overfitting issues. These results demonstrate how transformer-based architectures such as RoBERTa offer advantages in real-world applications, particularly in e-commerce and social media sentiment analysis. This study underscores the superior capabilities of RoBERTa for sentiment analysis, particularly in processing semantically diverse and context-rich textual data that traditional models struggle to capture. Future work will explore optimizing RoBERTa's computational efficiency and expanding its applications to multilingual and cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks.