A Hybrid NER–Sentiment Model for Uzbek Texts: Integrating Lexical, Deep Learning, and Entity-Based Approaches
Abstract
This work proposes a hybrid Uzbek sentiment analysis model (sometimes referred to as tonality analysis in the local literature) that integrates contextual text representations with named-entity information from an NER module and emoji-based emotional cues that are common in short online messages. To provide a comprehensive baseline comparison, we evaluate seven approaches—SVM, LSTM, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa-base, mDeBERTa-v3, LaBSE, and the proposed hybrid model—covering both classical machine learning and modern multilingual transformer architectures for low-resource sentiment tasks. The overall pipeline begins with Uzbek-specific text normalization to reduce noise from informal spellings, transliteration variants, and inconsistent apostrophe usage. In parallel, the system performs explicit emoji extraction to capture affective signals that are often expressed non-verbally in social media texts. Next, we construct three complementary feature streams: a context encoder for sentence-level semantics, NER-driven entity features that encode entity mentions and types, and an emotion module that models emoji priors and their interaction with contextual meaning. These streams are fused into a unified representation and fed to a final classifier to predict sentiment polarity. Experiments on an Uzbek test set demonstrate that the hybrid model reaches an F1-score of 0.92, consistently outperforming text-only baselines. The results indicate that entity-aware and emoji-informed features improve robustness under sarcasm/irony, mixed sentiment with multiple targets, and orthographic noise, making the approach suitable for social media analytics, public opinion monitoring, customer feedback triage, and recommendation-oriented text mining.