We consider the cross-domain sentiment classification problem, where a sentiment classifier is to be learned from a source domain and to be generalized to a target domain. Our approach explicitly minimizes the distance between the source and the target instances in an embedded feature space. With the difference between source and target minimized, we then exploit additional information from the target domain by consolidating the idea of semi-supervised learning, for which, we jointly employ two regularizations -- entropy minimization and self-ensemble bootstrapping -- to incorporate the unlabeled target data for classifier refinement. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can better leverage unlabeled data from the target domain and achieve substantial improvements over baseline methods in various experimental settings.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as "supervision." These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment polarity classifier to predict the sentiment polarity of each aspect given a document. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity,…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Huawei Research Centre（华为研究中心）
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis is a dominant research area with potential applications in social media analytics, business, finance, and health. Prior works in this area are primarily based on supervised methods, with a few techniques using weak supervision limited to predicting a single aspect category per review sentence. In this paper, we present an extremely weakly supervised multi-label Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis framework which does not use any labelled data. We only rely on a single word per class as an initial indicative information. We further propose an automatic word select…
Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language understanding. It requires fine-grained semantical reasoning about a target entity appeared in the text. As manual annotation over the aspects is laborious and time-consuming, the amount of labeled data is limited for supervised learning. This paper proposes a semi-supervised method for the ATSA problem by using the Variational Autoencoder based on Transformer (VAET), which models the latent distribution via variational inference. By disentangling the latent representation into the aspect-specific sentiment a…
Most of existing work learn sentiment-specific word representation for improving Twitter sentiment classification, which encoded both n-gram and distant supervised tweet sentiment information in learning process. They assume all words within a tweet have the same sentiment polarity as the whole tweet, which ignores the word its own sentiment polarity. To address this problem, we propose to learn sentiment-specific word embedding by exploiting both lexicon resource and distant supervised information. We develop a multi-level sentiment-enriched word embedding learning method, which uses parallel…
While sentiment analysis has become an established field in the NLP community, research into languages other than English has been hindered by the lack of resources. Although much research in multi-lingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has focused on unsupervised or semi-supervised approaches, these still require a large number of resources and do not reach the performance of supervised approaches. With this in mind, we introduce two datasets for supervised aspect-level sentiment analysis in Basque and Catalan, both of which are under-resourced languages. We provide high-quality annotat…
Digital Humanities Colab（数字人文合作实验室）；Integrated Program for Humane Studies（人文研究综合项目）；Kenyon College（凯尼恩学院）
SOTA Transformer and DNN short text sentiment classifiers report over 97% accuracy on narrow domains like IMDB movie reviews. Real-world performance is significantly lower because traditional models overfit benchmarks and generalize poorly to different or more open domain texts. This paper introduces SentimentArcs, a new self-supervised time series sentiment analysis methodology that addresses the two main limitations of traditional supervised sentiment analysis: limited labeled training datasets and poor generalization. A large ensemble of diverse models provides a synthetic ground truth for …
Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to identify the sentiment polarity of a specific aspect in product reviews. We notice that about 30% of reviews do not contain obvious opinion words, but still convey clear human-aware sentiment orientation, which is known as implicit sentiment. However, recent neural network-based approaches paid little attention to implicit sentiment entailed in the reviews. To overcome this issue, we adopt Supervised Contrastive Pre-training on large-scale sentiment-annotated corpora retrieved from in-domain language resources. By aligning the representation of implicit …
In order to maximize the applicability of sentiment analysis results, it is necessary to not only classify the overall sentiment (positive/negative) of a given document but also to identify the main words that contribute to the classification. However, most datasets for sentiment analysis only have the sentiment label for each document or sentence. In other words, there is no information about which words play an important role in sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying key words discriminating positive and negative sentences by using a weakly supervised le…
Sentiment analysis is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). Most of existing state-of-the-art methods are under the supervised learning paradigm. However, human annotations can be scarce. Thus, we should leverage more weak supervision for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a posterior regularization framework for the variational approach to the weakly supervised sentiment analysis to better control the posterior distribution of the label assignment. The intuition behind the posterior regularization is that if extracted opinion words from two documents are semantica…
The importance of building sentiment analysis tools for Arabic social media has been recognized during the past couple of years, especially with the rapid increase in the number of Arabic social media users. One of the main difficulties in tackling this problem is that text within social media is mostly colloquial, with many dialects being used within social media platforms. In this paper, we present a set of features that were integrated with a machine learning based sentiment analysis model and applied on Egyptian, Saudi, Levantine, and MSA Arabic social media datasets. Many of the proposed …
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
In aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), many neural models are equipped with an attention mechanism to quantify the contribution of each context word to sentiment prediction. However, such a mechanism suffers from one drawback: only a few frequent words with sentiment polarities are tended to be taken into consideration for final sentiment decision while abundant infrequent sentiment words are ignored by models. To deal with this issue, we propose a progressive self-supervised attention learning approach for attentional ABSA models. In this approach, we iteratively perform sentiment predict…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC), it is prevalent to equip dominant neural models with attention mechanisms, for the sake of acquiring the importance of each context word on the given aspect. However, such a mechanism tends to excessively focus on a few frequent words with sentiment polarities, while ignoring infrequent ones. In this paper, we propose a progressive self-supervised attention learning approach for neural ASC models, which automatically mines useful attention supervision information from a training corpus to refine attention mechanisms. Specifically, we iteratively …
This study aims to understand the South African political context by analysing the sentiments shared on Twitter during the local government elections. An emphasis on the analysis was placed on understanding the discussions led around four predominant political parties ANC, DA, EFF and ActionSA. A semi-supervised approach by means of a graph-based technique to label the vast accessible Twitter data for the classification of tweets into negative and positive sentiment was used. The tweets expressing negative sentiment were further analysed through latent topic extraction to uncover hidden topics…
This study implements a vector space model approach to measure the sentiment orientations of words. Two representative vectors for positive/negative polarity are constructed using high-dimensional vec-tor space in both an unsupervised and a semi-supervised manner. A sentiment ori-entation value per word is determined by taking the difference between the cosine distances against the two reference vec-tors. These two conditions (unsupervised and semi-supervised) are compared against an existing unsupervised method (Turney, 2002). As a result of our experi-ment, we demonstrate that this novel ap-…
In this paper, we propose an extension to graph-based sentiment lexicon induction methods by incorporating distributed and semantic word representations in building the similarity graph to expand a three-dimensional sentiment lexicon. We also implemented and evaluated the label propagation using four different word representations and similarity metrics. Our comprehensive evaluation of the four approaches was performed on a single data set, demonstrating that all four methods can generate a significant number of new sentiment assignments with high accuracy. The highest correlations (tau=0.51) …
Konya Technical University（科尼亚技术大学）；University of Manouba（马努巴大学）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）
Social media reflects the public attitudes towards specific events. Events are often related to persons, locations or organizations, the so-called Named Entities. This can define Named Entities as sentiment-bearing components. In this paper, we dive beyond Named Entities recognition to the exploitation of sentiment-annotated Named Entities in Arabic sentiment analysis. Therefore, we develop an algorithm to detect the sentiment of Named Entities based on the majority of attitudes towards them. This enabled tagging Named Entities with proper tags and, thus, including them in a sentiment analysis…
Sentiments of words differ from one corpus to another. Inducing general sentiment lexicons for languages and using them cannot, in general, produce meaningful results for different domains. In this paper, we combine contextual and supervised information with the general semantic representations of words occurring in the dictionary. Contexts of words help us capture the domain-specific information and supervised scores of words are indicative of the polarities of those words. When we combine supervised features of words with the features extracted from their dictionary definitions, we observe a…
Commercial establishments like restaurants, service centres and retailers have several sources of customer feedback about products and services, most of which need not be as structured as rated reviews provided by services like Yelp, or Amazon, in terms of sentiment conveyed. For instance, Amazon provides a fine-grained score on a numeric scale for product reviews. Some sources, however, like social media (Twitter, Facebook), mailing lists (Google Groups) and forums (Quora) contain text data that is much more voluminous, but unstructured and unlabelled. It might be in the best interests of a b…
We used a token-wise and document-wise sentiment analysis using both unsupervised and supervised models applied to both news and user reviews dataset. And our token-wise sentiment analysis found a statistically significant difference in sentiment between the two groups (both of which were very large N), our document-wise supervised sentiment analysis found no significant difference in sentiment.
With the increase of online customer opinions in specialised websites and social networks, the necessity of automatic systems to help to organise and classify customer reviews by domain-specific aspect/categories and sentiment polarity is more important than ever. Supervised approaches to Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis obtain good results for the domain/language their are trained on, but having manually labelled data for training supervised systems for all domains and languages are usually very costly and time consuming. In this work we describe W2VLDA, an almost unsupervised system based on …
Intel AI Lab（英特尔人工智能实验室）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
We present ABSApp, a portable system for weakly-supervised aspect-based sentiment extraction. The system is interpretable and user friendly and does not require labeled training data, hence can be rapidly and cost-effectively used across different domains in applied setups. The system flow includes three stages: First, it generates domain-specific aspect and opinion lexicons based on an unlabeled dataset; second, it enables the user to view and edit those lexicons (weak supervision); and finally, it enables the user to select an unlabeled target dataset from the same domain, classify it, and g…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis of review texts is of great value for understanding user feedback in a fine-grained manner. It has in general two sub-tasks: (i) extracting aspects from each review, and (ii) classifying aspect-based reviews by sentiment polarity. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis, which uses only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. Existing methods are either designed only for one of the sub-tasks, neglecting the benefit of coupling both, or are based on topic models that ma…
CenturyLink（世纪互联公司）；International Management Institute Bhubaneswar（布巴内斯瓦尔国际管理学院）
The purpose of the study is to investigate the relative effectiveness of four different sentiment analysis techniques: (1) unsupervised lexicon-based model using Sent WordNet; (2) traditional supervised machine learning model using logistic regression; (3) supervised deep learning model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM); and, (4) advanced supervised deep learning models using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We use publicly available labeled corpora of 50,000 movie reviews originally posted on internet movie database (IMDB) for analysis using Sent WordNet lexic…
Representation Learning is a significant and challenging task in multimodal learning. Effective modality representations should contain two parts of characteristics: the consistency and the difference. Due to the unified multimodal annotation, existing methods are restricted in capturing differentiated information. However, additional uni-modal annotations are high time- and labor-cost. In this paper, we design a label generation module based on the self-supervised learning strategy to acquire independent unimodal supervisions. Then, joint training the multi-modal and uni-modal tasks to learn …
Sentiment analysis, a popular technique for opinion mining, has been used by the software engineering research community for tasks such as assessing app reviews, developer emotions in issue trackers and developer opinions on APIs. Past research indicates that state-of-the-art sentiment analysis techniques have poor performance on SE data. This is because sentiment analysis tools are often designed to work on non-technical documents such as movie reviews. In this study, we attempt to solve the issues with existing sentiment analysis techniques for SE texts by proposing a hierarchical model base…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to unsupervised sentiment analysis. Instead of using ground truth provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as a supervision signal. For example, in a document snippet "the room is big," (room, big) is a target-opinion word pair. These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective function is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment classifier. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（甘地纳加尔印度理工学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（克勒格布尔印度理工学院）
The task of learning a sentiment classification model that adapts well to any target domain, different from the source domain, is a challenging problem. Majority of the existing approaches focus on learning a common representation by leveraging both source and target data during training. In this paper, we introduce a two-stage training procedure that leverages weakly supervised datasets for developing simple lift-and-shift-based predictive models without being exposed to the target domain during the training phase. Experimental results show that transfer with weak supervision from a source do…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Sentiment classification involves quantifying the affective reaction of a human to a document, media item or an event. Although researchers have investigated several methods to reliably infer sentiment from lexical, speech and body language cues, training a model with a small set of labeled datasets is still a challenge. For instance, in expanding sentiment analysis to new languages and cultures, it may not always be possible to obtain comprehensive labeled datasets. In this paper, we investigate the application of semi-supervised and transfer learning methods to improve performances on low re…
Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics（Insight SFI数据分析研究中心）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）；Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala（喀拉拉邦信息技术与管理学院）
There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-C…
Aspect-Target Sentiment Classification (ATSC) is a subtask of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), which has many applications e.g. in e-commerce, where data and insights from reviews can be leveraged to create value for businesses and customers. Recently, deep transfer-learning methods have been applied successfully to a myriad of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including ATSC. Building on top of the prominent BERT language model, we approach ATSC using a two-step procedure: self-supervised domain-specific BERT language model finetuning, followed by supervised task-specific finetu…
University of Charleston（查尔斯顿大学）；Apple Inc.（苹果公司）；Cerence B. V.（赛轮思公司）
Efficient textual data distributions (TDD) alignment and generation are open research problems in textual analytics and NLP. It is presently difficult to parsimoniously and methodologically confirm that two or more natural language datasets belong to similar distributions, and to identify the extent to which textual data possess alignment. This study focuses on addressing a segment of the broader problem described above by applying multiple supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) methods to explore the behavior of TDD by (i) topical alignment, and (ii) by sentiment alignment. Further…
This paper describes a weakly supervised system for sentiment analysis in the movie review domain. The objective is to classify a movie review into a polarity class, positive or negative, based on those sentences bearing opinion on the movie alone. The irrelevant text, not directly related to the reviewer opinion on the movie, is left out of analysis. Wikipedia incorporates the world knowledge of movie-specific features in the system which is used to obtain an extractive summary of the review, consisting of the reviewer's opinions about the specific aspects of the movie. This filters out the c…
We present a novel unsupervised approach for multilingual sentiment analysis driven by compositional syntax-based rules. On the one hand, we exploit some of the main advantages of unsupervised algorithms: (1) the interpretability of their output, in contrast with most supervised models, which behave as a black box and (2) their robustness across different corpora and domains. On the other hand, by introducing the concept of compositional operations and exploiting syntactic information in the form of universal dependencies, we tackle one of their main drawbacks: their rigidity on data that are …
Aix Marseille Université（艾克斯-马赛大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；ENSAM（法国国立高等艺术与职业学院）；Université de Toulon（土伦大学）
Term weighting metrics assign weights to terms in order to discriminate the important terms from the less crucial ones. Due to this characteristic, these metrics have attracted growing attention in text classification and recently in sentiment analysis. Using the weights given by such metrics could lead to more accurate document representation which may improve the performance of the classification. While previous studies have focused on proposing or comparing different weighting metrics at two-classes document level sentiment analysis, this study propose to analyse the results given by each m…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation（语言、认知与计算研究所）；School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）
We present a neural framework for opinion summarization from online product reviews which is knowledge-lean and only requires light supervision (e.g., in the form of product domain labels and user-provided ratings). Our method combines two weakly supervised components to identify salient opinions and form extractive summaries from multiple reviews: an aspect extractor trained under a multi-task objective, and a sentiment predictor based on multiple instance learning. We introduce an opinion summarization dataset that includes a training set of product reviews from six diverse domains and human…
Sentiment Analysis is an important algorithm in Natural Language Processing which is used to detect sentiment within some text. In our project, we had chosen to work on analyzing reviews of various drugs which have been reviewed in form of texts and have also been given a rating on a scale from 1-10. We had obtained this data set from the UCI machine learning repository which had 2 data sets: train and test (split as 75-25\%). We had split the number rating for the drug into three classes in general: positive (7-10), negative (1-4) or neutral(4-7). There are multiple reviews for the drugs that…
This paper presents a novel approach for multi-lingual sentiment classification in short texts. This is a challenging task as the amount of training data in languages other than English is very limited. Previously proposed multi-lingual approaches typically require to establish a correspondence to English for which powerful classifiers are already available. In contrast, our method does not require such supervision. We leverage large amounts of weakly-supervised data in various languages to train a multi-layer convolutional network and demonstrate the importance of using pre-training of such n…
[24]7.ai；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
End-to-end learning framework is useful for building dialog systems for its simplicity in training and efficiency in model updating. However, current end-to-end approaches only consider user semantic inputs in learning and under-utilize other user information. Therefore, we propose to include user sentiment obtained through multimodal information (acoustic, dialogic and textual), in the end-to-end learning framework to make systems more user-adaptive and effective. We incorporated user sentiment information in both supervised and reinforcement learning settings. In both settings, adding sentim…
Web 2.0服务使人们能够以用户生成内容的形式表达他们的意见，体验和感受。情感分析或意见挖掘涉及根据其积极或消极的极性识别，分类和汇总意见。本文研究了不同的自组织映射（SOM）的实现基于情感的可视化和分类的在线评论的有效性。具体来说，本文实现了SOM算法的监督和无监督学习从文本文件。无监督SOM算法实现基于情感的可视化和分类任务。对于监督式情感分析，使用称为学习向量量化的竞争性学习算法。这两种算法还比较了各自的多通道实现，其中快速粗排序通过之后是一个微调通过。在在线电影评论数据集上的实验结果表明，SOM非常适合于基于情感的分类和情感极性可视化。
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Aspect-based sentiment classification (ASC) is an important task in fine-grained sentiment analysis.~Deep supervised ASC approaches typically model this task as a pair-wise classification task that takes an aspect and a sentence containing the aspect and outputs the polarity of the aspect in that sentence. However, we discovered that many existing approaches fail to learn an effective ASC classifier but more like a sentence-level sentiment classifier because they have difficulty to handle sentences with different polarities for different aspects.~This paper first demonstrates this problem usin…
Analysis of informative contents and sentiments of social users has been attempted quite intensively in the recent past. Most of the systems are usable only for monolingual data and fails or gives poor results when used on data with code-mixing property. To gather attention and encourage researchers to work on this crisis, we prepared gold standard Bengali-English code-mixed data with language and polarity tag for sentiment analysis purposes. In this paper, we discuss the systems we prepared to collect and filter raw Twitter data. In order to reduce manual work while annotation, hybrid systems…
Products reviews are one of the major resources to determine the public sentiment. The existing literature on reviews sentiment analysis mainly utilizes supervised paradigm, which needs labeled data to be trained on and suffers from domain-dependency. This article addresses these issues by describes a completely automatic approach for sentiment analysis based on unsupervised ensemble learning. The method consists of two phases. The first phase is contextual analysis, which has five processes, namely (1) data preparation; (2) spelling correction; (3) intensifier handling; (4) negation handling …
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
Domain adaptation for sentiment analysis is challenging due to the fact that supervised classifiers are very sensitive to changes in domain. The two most prominent approaches to this problem are structural correspondence learning and autoencoders. However, they either require long training times or suffer greatly on highly divergent domains. Inspired by recent advances in cross-lingual sentiment analysis, we provide a novel perspective and cast the domain adaptation problem as an embedding projection task. Our model takes as input two mono-domain embedding spaces and learns to project them to …
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Market sentiment analysis on social media content requires knowledge of both financial markets and social media jargon, which makes it a challenging task for human raters. The resulting lack of high-quality labeled data stands in the way of conventional supervised learning methods. Instead, we approach this problem using semi-supervised learning with a large language model (LLM). Our pipeline generates weak financial sentiment labels for Reddit posts with an LLM and then uses that data to train a small model that can be served in production. We find that prompting the LLM to produce Chain-of-T…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
In this study, we explored application of Word2Vec and Doc2Vec for sentiment analysis of clinical discharge summaries. We applied unsupervised learning since the data sets did not have sentiment annotations. Note that unsupervised learning is a more realistic scenario than supervised learning which requires an access to a training set of sentiment-annotated data. We aim to detect if there exists any underlying bias towards or against a certain disease. We used SentiWordNet to establish a gold sentiment standard for the data sets and evaluate performance of Word2Vec and Doc2Vec methods. We have…
Shared and Private Information Learning in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Deep Modal Alignment and Self-supervised Multi-Task Learning
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University（兰州大学信息科学与工程学院）；Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学地理科学与规划学院）；Department of Military Medical Psychology, Air Force Medical University（空军军医大学军事医学心理学系）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Assets and Laboratory Management Department, Shandong University（山东大学资产与实验室管理部）
