Sentiment Analysis of Public Opinion on Deforestation in Papua on YouTube Platform Using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Method

Abstract

Deforestation in Papua has emerged as a significant environmental concern, attracting considerable attention due to its effects on biodiversity and the livelihoods of indigenous communities. This study seeks to examine public sentiment toward the issue by analyzing comments posted on the YouTube platform, employing the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) method. A dataset of 3,000 comments was gathered and processed through several stages, including text cleaning, tokenization, normalization, and Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting. Subsequently, an LSTM model was developed and assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score as evaluation metrics. The results reveal that the LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 88.43%, a precision of 90.01%, a recall of 97.49%, and an F1-score of 93.60%. Nevertheless, signs of overfitting were observed, indicated by lower validation performance compared to training results. These findings demonstrate that the LSTM approach is effective for identifying public opinion regarding deforestation and can serve as a valuable reference in decision-making and the formulation of environmental policies.