Text Analytics on YouTube Comments for Food Products

YouTube is a popular social media platform in the contemporary digital landscape. The primary focus of this study is to explore the underlying sentiment in user comments about food-related videos on YouTube, specifically within two pivotal food categories: plant-based and hedonic product. We labeled comments using sentiment lexicons such as TextBlob, VADER, and Google’s Sentiment Analysis (GSA) engine. Comment sentiment was classified using advanced Machine-Learning (ML) algorithms, namely Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multinomial Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and XGBoost. The evaluation of these models encompassed key macro average metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results from GSA showed a high accuracy level, with SVM achieving 93% accuracy in the plant-based dataset and 96% in the hedonic dataset. In addition to sentiment analysis, we delved into user interactions within the two datasets, measuring crucial metrics, such as views, likes, comments, and engagement rate. The findings illuminate significantly higher levels of views, likes, and comments in the hedonic food dataset, but the plant-based dataset maintains a superior overall engagement rate.