I’ll go ahead and summarize our discussion as the answer here.
Your goal is to be able to incorporate text into your neural network. We have established that traditional ANNs are not really suitable for analyzing text. The underlying explanation for why this is so is based around the idea that ANNs operate on inputs that are generally a continuous range of values and the nearness of two values for an input means some sort of nearness in their meaning. Words do not have this idea of nearness and so, there’s no real numerical encoding for words that can make sense as input to an ANN.
On the other hand, a solution that might work is to use a more traditional semantic analysis which could, perhaps produce sentiment ranges for a list of topics and then those topics and their sentiment values could possibly be used as input for an ANN.