A Topic-Aware Structured Semantic Representation Framework for Sentiment Analysis in Greek Social Media
Sentiment analysis for Greek social media texts remains challenging because of limited annotated resources, linguistic variation, and domain-dependent sentiment expression. This study presents a topic-aware, lexicon-guided framework for sentiment classification across five reference domains in Greek social media. Domain-specific sentiment lexicons are activated according to the relevant domain and transformed into a structured representation comprising a token-level multi-channel lexical matrix and aggregate lexical descriptors. A fusion convolutional neural network combines these complementary components to classify sentiment while retaining explicit lexical evidence for inspection. The evaluation follows a leakage-free protocol: lexicons are constructed exclusively from the sentiment inner-training subset, validation data are used for model selection, and a held-out test set is reserved for final evaluation. The proposed fusion CNN achieved the strongest held-out sentiment result among the evaluated models, with an Accuracy of 0.8029 and a Macro-F1 of 0.7883, exceeding TF–IDF + Linear SVM and fine-tuned GreekBERT baselines in the present experimental setting. Ablation results show that the token-level lexical matrix and global descriptors provide complementary information. For domain routing, GreekBERT late fusion achieved an Accuracy of 0.9162 and a Macro-F1 of 0.9116. When lexicon activation used predicted rather than reference domains, the end-to-end sentiment pipeline achieved a Macro-F1 of 0.7569. These findings indicate that explicit domain-specific lexical knowledge can support an interpretable sentiment representation while making the effects of lexical coverage and topic-routing uncertainty visible.