# Privacy Preserving Topic-wise Sentiment Analysis of the Iran Israel USA Conflict Using Federated Transformer Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13655 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13655/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Differential Privacy and Federated Learning for BERT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13973/) (2021)
- [TWSSenti: A Novel Hybrid Framework for Topic-Wise Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Using Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09896/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Multilingual Sentiment Analysis with Explainability for Sinhala, English, and Code-Mixed Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13545/) (2025)
- [Integration of Explainable AI Techniques with Large Language Models for Enhanced Interpretability for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11948/) (2025)
- [InstructNet: A Novel Approach for Multi-Label Instruction Classification through Advanced Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18301/) (2025)
- [Transparent AI for Mathematics: Transformer-Based Large Language Models for Mathematical Entity Relationship Extraction with XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06348/) (2026)
- [Explainable AI for Sentiment Analysis of Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) Using XLNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01663/) (2025)
- [XAI-enhanced Comparative Opinion Mining via Aspect-based Scoring and Semantic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01212/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent escalation of the Iran Israel USA conflict in 2026 has triggered widespread global discussions across social media platforms. As people increasingly use these platforms for expressing opinions, analyzing public sentiment from these discussions can provide valuable insights into global public perception. This study aims to analyze global public sentiment regarding the Iran Israel USA conflict by mining user-generated comments from YouTube news channels. The work contributes to public opinion analysis by introducing a privacy preserving framework that combines topic wise sentiment analysis with modern deep learning techniques and Federated Learning. To achieve this, approximately 19,000 YouTube comments were collected from major international news channels and preprocessed to remove noise and normalize text. Sentiment labels were initially generated using the VADER sentiment analyzer and later validated through manual inspection to improve reliability. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to identify key discussion topics related to the conflict. Several transformer-based models, including BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, DistilBERT, ModernBERT, and ELECTRA, were fine tuned for sentiment classification. The best-performing model was further integrated into a federated learning environment to enable distributed training by preserving user data privacy. Additionally, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques using SHAP were applied to interpret model predictions and identify influential words affecting sentiment classification. Experimental results demonstrate that transformer models perform effectively, and among them, ELECTRA achieved the best performance with 91.32% accuracy. The federated learning also maintained strong performance while preserving privacy, achieving 89.59% accuracy in a two client configuration.