This study delves into the realm of sentiment analysis in the Amharic language, focusing on political sentences extracted from social media platforms in Ethiopia. The research employs deep learning techniques, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), and a hybrid model combining CNN with Bi-LSTM to analyze and classify sentiments. The hybrid CNN-Bi-LSTM model emerges as the top performer, achieving an impressive accuracy of 91.60%. While these results mark a significant milestone, challenges persist, such as the need for a more extensive and diverse dataset and the identification of nuanced sentiments like sarcasm and figurative speech. The study underscores the importance of transitioning from binary sentiment analysis to a multi-class classification approach, enabling a finer-grained understanding of sentiments. Moreover, the establishment of a standardized corpus for Amharic sentiment analysis emerges as a critical endeavor with broad applicability beyond politics, spanning domains like agriculture, industry, tourism, sports, entertainment, and satisfaction analysis. The exploration of sarcastic comments in the Amharic language stands out as a promising avenue for future research.
© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.