DataStories at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Deep LSTM with Attention for Message-level and Topic-based Sentiment Analysis

In this paper we present two deep-learning systems that competed at SemEval-2017 Task 4 "Sentiment Analysis in Twitter". We participated in all subtasks for English tweets, involving message-level and topic-based sentiment polarity classification and quantification. We use Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks augmented with two kinds of attention mechanisms, on top of word embeddings pre-trained on a big collection of Twitter messages. Also, we present a text processing tool suitable for social network messages, which performs tokenization, word normalization, segmentation and spell correction. Moreover, our approach uses no hand-crafted features or sentiment lexicons. We ranked 1 st (tie) in Subtask A, and achieved very competitive results in the rest of the Subtasks. Both the word embeddings and our text processing tool 1 are available to the research community.