Performance analysis of naive bayes in text classification of islamophobia issues

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2013 Woolwich attack, a disturbing surge in hate crimes against the Muslim community emerged both offline and on social media platforms, prompting concerns about the widespread issue of Islamophobia. To systematically evaluate and quantify the presence of Islamophobic sentiment in online spaces, this study employed sentiment analysis, a robust method for deriving insights from textual data. Two classification models, Bernoulli Naive Bayes and Multinomial Naive Bayes, were selected to conduct a thorough analysis. Bernoulli Naive Bayes, specialized in handling binary data, was used for binary sentiment analysis, while Multinomial Naive Bayes, well-suited for data with multiple occurrences, was applied for more comprehensive analysis. The research encompassed nine meticulously designed test-train data scenarios, ranging from a 10:90 test-train data ratio to a 20:80 ratio. Surprisingly, both models exhibited a maximum accuracy rate of 68% in their respective optimal scenarios, raising intriguing questions about the potential and limitations of sentiment analysis and Naive Bayes models in the complex task of identifying and quantifying Islamophobic content on social media