Attention-Augmented Hybrid CNN- BiLSTM Architecture for Real-Time Sentiment Classification of Twitter Text

Abstract

Short, informal text on Twitter has become a major source of public-opinion data, yet extracting dependable sentiment signals from it is challenging because many existing models fail to jointly capture fine-grained word-level cues and broader contextual meaning. This study proposes a hybrid deep-learning framework that combines convolutional feature extraction with a bidirectional recurrent encoder and an attention mechanism to categories tweets as positive, neutral, or negative. Three parallel one-dimensional convolutional (Conv1D) branches first capture local n-gram patterns of varying width, after which a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layer models dependencies across the whole sequence in both directions, and an additive attention component then highlights the specific tokens most responsible for the predicted polarity. The processing pipeline further incorporates a Twitter-specific preparation stage that performs emoji-to-text conversion, informal-language normalization, and hash tag decomposition, addressing noise patterns that generic NLP pipelines are not designed to handle. The architecture was evaluated on a curate collection of 50,000 manually annotated tweets spanning several topical domains. It achieved a test accuracy of 87.7% and a weighted F1-score of 0.877, outperforming a TF-IDF/SVM baseline (79.8%), a standalone CNN (85.1%), a single-direction LSTM (83.5%), a BiLSTM without attention (85.5%), and a fine-tuned BERT-base model (86.9%). The proposed model maintained consistent performance across politics-, e-commerce-, and health-related tweet subsets, indicating that the learned representations generalize reasonably well across domains rather than over fitting to a single topic. These findings suggest that combining local feature extraction, bidirectional context modeling, and attention-based token weighting can approach transformer-level accuracy while remaining considerably lighter computationally, making the approach attractive for real-time or resource-constrained deployment. Future work is outlined around integrating transformer-based embeddings, extending the framework to multilingual and code-switched text, and adapting the pipeline for continuous streaming inference.