The use of pretrained language models in sentiment analysis

Natural language processing is one of the sub-topics of linguistic science and artificial intelligence. Sentiment analysis classifies a text on any topic according to its subjective content. It is one of the methods used to examine, analyze and interpret data such as the thoughts, feelings or attitudes of individuals about a subject on various platforms. The increase in social media shares has also increased the sentiment analysis studies conducted on these platforms. Different methods are used during sentiment analysis. Classification is carried out by sentiment analysis using machine learning and natural language processing algorithms. In recent years, pre-trained language models have been used together with machine learning methods or alone. The aim of this thesis is to test the hypothetical advantages of sentiment analysis in social media comments with pre-trained language models. For this purpose, sentiment analysis was performed for Covid-19 related tweets on Twitter. Emotion intensities were determined using pre-trained language models and the results were compared. BERT, RoBERTa and BERTweet were used in the analysis. The results show that NLP techniques for sentiment analysis are as successful as other techniques.