Crime prediction using a hybrid sentiment analysis approach based on the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers

Abstract

Sentiment analysis (SA) is widely used today in many areas such as crime detection (security intelligence) to detect potential security threats in realtime using social media platforms such as Twitter. The most promising techniques in sentiment analysis are those of deep learning (DL), particularly bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) in the field of natural language processing (NLP). However, employing the BERT algorithm to detect crimes requires a crime dataset labeled by the lexiconbased approach. In this paper, we used a hybrid approach that combines both lexicon-based and deep learning, with BERT as the DL model. We employed the lexicon-based approach to label our Twitter dataset with a set of normal and crime-related lexicons; then, we used the obtained labeled dataset to train our BERT model. The experimental results show that our hybrid technique outperforms existing approaches in several metrics, with 94.91% and 94.92% in accuracy and F1-score respectively.