International Journal of Engineering, Science and Information Technology
Vol 6, No 3 (2026)

Improving Sentiment Classification of Indonesian Skincare Reviews through Fine-Tuned IndoBERT and Data Augmentation

Nadia Thahira (Universitas Malikussaleh)
Ar Razi (Universitas Malikussaleh)



Article Info

Publish Date
10 Jul 2026

Abstract

This study analyzes sentiment in customer reviews of local skincare serum products on the Tokopedia e-commerce platform using a fine-tuned IndoBERT model enhanced with data augmentation techniques. A total of 5,000 reviews were collected from ten local skincare brands through web scraping and labeled according to star ratings into three sentiment classes: Positive, Neutral, and Negative. The dataset exhibited extreme class imbalance, with the Positive class representing 94.66% of all observations, creating substantial challenges for minority-class recognition. The data were divided through stratified sampling into 70% training, 15% validation, and 15% test sets to preserve class distributions. To mitigate imbalance, back-translation from Indonesian to English and back to Indonesian, together with synonym replacement, was applied exclusively to minority classes within the training set. The IndoBERT-base-p1 model was subsequently fine-tuned using focal loss combined with class weighting and compared against a baseline model trained without augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieved 94.40% accuracy, a Macro F1-score of 61.43%, and a Weighted F1-score of 95.14%. Although the baseline model obtained higher overall accuracy of 97.47%, it completely failed to identify the Neutral class, producing an F1-score of 0.00%. In contrast, the proposed approach increased the Neutral F1-score to 23.53% and improved the Macro F1-score by 2.30 percentage points, demonstrating more balanced performance across sentiment classes. The resulting model was deployed as SerumSense, a web-based application developed using Streamlit and SQLite, supporting both single-review and batch sentiment analysis. Black-box testing across 20 functional scenarios confirmed that all application features operated successfully as intended. These findings demonstrate that combining IndoBERT fine-tuning, targeted data augmentation, focal loss, and class weighting offers a practical approach for improving minority-class recognition in highly imbalanced Indonesian e-commerce review datasets.

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