Nowadays, an abundance of short text is being generated that uses nonstandard writing styles influenced by regional languages. Such informal and code-switched content are under-resourced in terms of labeled datasets and language models even for popular tasks like sentiment classification. In this work, we (1) present a labeled dataset called MultiSenti for sentiment classification of code-switched informal short text, (2) explore the feasibility of adapting resources from a resource-rich language for an informal one, and (3) propose a deep learning-based model for sentiment classification of code-switched informal short text. We aim to achieve this without any lexical normalization, language translation, or code-switching indication. The performance of the proposed models is compared with three existing multilingual sentiment classification models. The results show that the proposed model performs better in general and adapting character-based embeddings yield equivalent performance while being computationally more efficient than training word-based domain-specific embeddings.
School of Data Science（数据科学学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；GSQ Tec.（GSQ科技公司）
Deep learning based natural language processing model is proven powerful, but need large-scale dataset. Due to the significant gap between the real-world tasks and existing Chinese corpus, in this paper, we introduce a large-scale corpus of informal Chinese. This corpus contains around 37 million book reviews and 50 thousand netizen's comments to the news. We explore the informal words frequencies of the corpus and show the difference between our corpus and the existing ones. The corpus can be further used to train deep learning based natural language processing tasks such as Chinese word segm…
A word's sentiment depends on the domain in which it is used. Computational social science research thus requires sentiment lexicons that are specific to the domains being studied. We combine domain-specific word embeddings with a label propagation framework to induce accurate domain-specific sentiment lexicons using small sets of seed words, achieving state-of-the-art performance competitive with approaches that rely on hand-curated resources. Using our framework we perform two large-scale empirical studies to quantify the extent to which sentiment varies across time and between communities. …
This work investigates segmentation approaches for sentiment analysis on informal short texts in Turkish. The two building blocks of the proposed work are segmentation and deep neural network model. Segmentation focuses on preprocessing of text with different methods. These methods are grouped in four: morphological, sub-word, tokenization, and hybrid approaches. We analyzed several variants for each of these four methods. The second stage focuses on evaluation of the neural model for sentiment analysis. The performance of each segmentation method is evaluated under Convolutional Neural Networ…
This study aimed to investigate the influence of the presence of informal language, such as emoticons and slang, on the performance of sentiment analysis models applied to social media text. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model was developed and trained on three datasets: a sarcasm dataset, a sentiment dataset, and an emoticon dataset. The model architecture was held constant for all experiments and the model was trained on 80% of the data and tested on 20%. The results revealed that the model achieved an accuracy of 96.47% on the sarcasm dataset, with the lowest accuracy for class 1. On…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Multilingual writers and speakers often alternate between two languages in a single discourse, a practice called "code-switching". Existing sentiment detection methods are usually trained on sentiment-labeled monolingual text. Manually labeled code-switched text, especially involving minority languages, is extremely rare. Consequently, the best monolingual methods perform relatively poorly on code-switched text. We present an effective technique for synthesizing labeled code-switched text from labeled monolingual text, which is more readily available. The idea is to replace carefully selected …
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校哈利奇奥卢数据科学研究所）
Multilingual transformer language models have recently attracted much attention from researchers and are used in cross-lingual transfer learning for many NLP tasks such as text classification and named entity recognition. However, similar methods for transfer learning from monolingual text to code-switched text have not been extensively explored mainly due to the following challenges: (1) Code-switched corpus, unlike monolingual corpus, consists of more than one language and existing methods can't be applied efficiently, (2) Code-switched corpus is usually made of resource-rich and low-resourc…
With increasing globalization and immigration, various studies have estimated that about half of the world population is bilingual. Consequently, individuals concurrently use two or more languages or dialects in casual conversational settings. However, most research is natural language processing is focused on monolingual text. To further the work in code-switched sentiment analysis, we propose a multi-step natural language processing algorithm utilizing points of code-switching in mixed text and conduct sentiment analysis around those identified points. The proposed sentiment analysis algorit…
Sentiment analysis is an important task in understanding social media content like customer reviews, Twitter and Facebook feeds etc. In multilingual communities around the world, a large amount of social media text is characterized by the presence of Code-Switching. Thus, it has become important to build models that can handle code-switched data. However, annotated code-switched data is scarce and there is a need for unsupervised models and algorithms. We propose a general framework called Unsupervised Self-Training and show its applications for the specific use case of sentiment analysis of c…
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Birmingham City University（伯明翰城市大学）
The growing popularity and applications of sentiment analysis of social media posts has naturally led to sentiment analysis of posts written in multiple languages, a practice known as code-switching. While recent research into code-switched posts has focused on the use of multilingual word embeddings, these embeddings were not trained on code-switched data. In this work, we present word-embeddings trained on code-switched tweets, specifically those that make use of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish. We explore the embedding space to discover how they capture the meanings of words in both…
Recent trends in NLP research have raised an interest in linguistic code-switching (CS); modern approaches have been proposed to solve a wide range of NLP tasks on multiple language pairs. Unfortunately, these proposed methods are hardly generalizable to different code-switched languages. In addition, it is unclear whether a model architecture is applicable for a different task while still being compatible with the code-switching setting. This is mainly because of the lack of a centralized benchmark and the sparse corpora that researchers employ based on their specific needs and interests. To …
This paper describes the system submitted to "Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN (TASS)-2019" shared task. The task includes sentiment analysis of Spanish tweets, where the tweets are in different dialects spoken in Spain, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Mexico. The tweets are short (up to 240 characters) and the language is informal, i.e., it contains misspellings, emojis, onomatopeias etc. Sentiment analysis includes classification of the tweets into 4 classes, viz., Positive, Negative, Neutral and None. For preparing the proposed system, we use Deep Learning networks like LSTMs.
T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Text style transfer rephrases a text from a source style (e.g., informal) to a target style (e.g., formal) while keeping its original meaning. Despite the success existing works have achieved using a parallel corpus for the two styles, transferring text style has proven significantly more challenging when there is no parallel training corpus. In this paper, we address this challenge by using a reinforcement-learning-based generator-evaluator architecture. Our generator employs an attention-based encoder-decoder to transfer a sentence from the source style to the target style. Our evaluator is …
Using task-specific pre-training and leveraging cross-lingual transfer are two of the most popular ways to handle code-switched data. In this paper, we aim to compare the effects of both for the task of sentiment analysis. We work with two Dravidian Code-Switched languages - Tamil-Engish and Malayalam-English and four different BERT based models. We compare the effects of task-specific pre-training and cross-lingual transfer and find that task-specific pre-training results in superior zero-shot and supervised performance when compared to performance achieved by leveraging cross-lingual transfe…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Code-switching, the interleaving of two or more languages within a sentence or discourse is pervasive in multilingual societies. Accurate language models for code-switched text are critical for NLP tasks. State-of-the-art data-intensive neural language models are difficult to train well from scarce language-labeled code-switched text. A potential solution is to use deep generative models to synthesize large volumes of realistic code-switched text. Although generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders can synthesize plausible monolingual text from continuous latent space, they c…
YouNet Group（YouNet集团）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology（胡志明市技术大学）；Vietnam National University - HCMC（胡志明市越南国家大学）
Sentiment analysis has been emerging recently as one of the major natural language processing (NLP) tasks in many applications. Especially, as social media channels (e.g. social networks or forums) have become significant sources for brands to observe user opinions about their products, this task is thus increasingly crucial. However, when applied with real data obtained from social media, we notice that there is a high volume of short and informal messages posted by users on those channels. This kind of data makes the existing works suffer from many difficulties to handle, especially ones usi…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic - English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resour…
Sentiment in social media is increasingly considered as an important resource for customer segmentation, market understanding, and tackling other socio-economic issues. However, sentiment in social media is difficult to measure since user-generated content is usually short and informal. Although many traditional sentiment analysis methods have been proposed, identifying slang sentiment words remains untackled. One of the reasons is that slang sentiment words are not available in existing dictionaries or sentiment lexicons. To this end, we propose to build the first sentiment dictionary of slan…
University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；IT University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根信息技术大学）
This paper explores the difficulties of annotating transcribed spoken Dutch-Frisian code-switch utterances into Universal Dependencies. We make use of data from the FAME! corpus, which consists of transcriptions and audio data. Besides the usual annotation difficulties, this dataset is extra challenging because of Frisian being low-resource, the informal nature of the data, code-switching and non-standard sentence segmentation. As a starting point, two annotators annotated 150 random utterances in three stages of 50 utterances. After each stage, disagreements where discussed and resolved. An i…
Code-switching is the use of more than one language in the same conversation or utterance. Recently, multilingual contextual embedding models, trained on multiple monolingual corpora, have shown promising results on cross-lingual and multilingual tasks. We present an evaluation benchmark, GLUECoS, for code-switched languages, that spans several NLP tasks in English-Hindi and English-Spanish. Specifically, our evaluation benchmark includes Language Identification from text, POS tagging, Named Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Question Answering and a new task for code-switching, Natural L…
Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome …
On social media, Arabic people tend to express themselves in their own local dialects. More particularly, Tunisians use the informal way called "Tunisian Arabizi". Analytical studies seek to explore and recognize online opinions aiming to exploit them for planning and prediction purposes such as measuring the customer satisfaction and establishing sales and marketing strategies. However, analytical studies based on Deep Learning are data hungry. On the other hand, African languages and dialects are considered low resource languages. For instance, to the best of our knowledge, no annotated Tuni…
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
While recent benchmarks have spurred a lot of new work on improving the generalization of pretrained multilingual language models on multilingual tasks, techniques to improve code-switched natural language understanding tasks have been far less explored. In this work, we propose the use of bilingual intermediate pretraining as a reliable technique to derive large and consistent performance gains on three different NLP tasks using code-switched text. We achieve substantial absolute improvements of 7.87%, 20.15%, and 10.99%, on the mean accuracies and F1 scores over previous state-of-the-art sys…
The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；Ferdowsi University of Mashhad（马什哈德菲尔多西大学）；Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德·贝赫什提大学）；University of Guilan（吉兰大学）
Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a major field of study in natural language processing, computational linguistics and information retrieval. Interest in SA has been constantly growing in both academia and industry over the recent years. Moreover, there is an increasing need for generating appropriate resources and datasets in particular for low resource languages including Persian. These datasets play an important role in designing and developing appropriate opinion mining platforms using supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised methods. In this paper, we outline the entire process of developing …
Constructing Colloquial Dataset for Persian Sentiment Analysis of Social Microblogs
Faculty member in ICT Research Institute（ICT研究所教员）；Iran Telecommunication Research Center (ITRC)（伊朗电信研究中心）；Faculty member in Computer Department（计算机系教员）；Mehralborz University（梅赫拉布尔兹大学）；Hazrat-e Masoumeh University（玛苏姆大学）
As the type and the number of such venues increase, automated analysis of sentiment on textual resources has become an essential data mining task. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining opinions on the collection of informal short texts. Both positive and negative sentiment strength of texts are detected. We focus on a non-English language that has few resources for text mining. This approach would help enhance the sentiment analysis in languages where a list of opinionated words does not exist. We propose a new method projects the text into dense and low dimensional feature vecto…
Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学）
As an extensive research in the field of natural language processing (NLP), aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is the task of predicting the sentiment expressed in a text relative to the corresponding aspect. Unfortunately, most languages lack sufficient annotation resources, thus more and more recent researchers focus on cross-lingual aspect-based sentiment analysis (XABSA). However, most recent researches only concentrate on cross-lingual data alignment instead of model alignment. To this end, we propose a novel framework, CL-XABSA: Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sen…
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad (IIIT-Hyderabad)（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院（IIIT-Hyderabad））
Code-mixing(CM) is a frequently observed phenomenon that uses multiple languages in an utterance or sentence. CM is mostly practiced on various social media platforms and in informal conversations. Sentiment analysis (SA) is a fundamental step in NLP and is well studied in the monolingual text. Code-mixing adds a challenge to sentiment analysis due to its non-standard representations. This paper proposes a meta embedding with a transformer method for sentiment analysis on the Dravidian code-mixed dataset. In our method, we used meta embeddings to capture rich text representations. We used the …
Colloquial Persian POS (CPPOS) Corpus: A Novel Corpus for Colloquial Persian Part of Speech Tagging
Iran Telecommunication Research Center (ITRC)（伊朗电信研究中心）；Faculty of New Sciences and Technologies, University of Tehran（德黑兰大学新科技学院）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS)（基础科学高级研究院）；Charles University in Prague（布拉格查理大学）；Petanux GmbH（Petanux有限公司）
Language recognition has been significantly advanced in recent years by means of modern machine learning methods such as deep learning and benchmarks with rich annotations. However, research is still limited in low-resource formal languages. This consists of a significant gap in describing the colloquial language especially for low-resourced ones such as Persian. In order to target this gap for low resource languages, we propose a "Large Scale Colloquial Persian Dataset" (LSCP). LSCP is hierarchically organized in a semantic taxonomy that focuses on multi-task informal Persian language underst…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；University of Salford（索尔福德大学）
In the recent decade, with the enormous growth of digital content in internet and databases, sentiment analysis has received more and more attention between information retrieval and natural language processing researchers. Sentiment analysis aims to use automated tools to detect subjective information from reviews. One of the main challenges in sentiment analysis is feature selection. Feature selection is widely used as the first stage of analysis and classification tasks to reduce the dimension of problem, and improve speed by the elimination of irrelevant and redundant features. Up to now a…
The explosion of user-generated content (UGC)--e.g. social media posts, comments, and reviews--has motivated the development of NLP applications tailored to these types of informal texts. Prevalent among these applications have been sentiment analysis and machine translation (MT). Grounded in the observation that UGC features highly idiomatic, sentiment-charged language, we propose a decoder-side approach that incorporates automatic sentiment scoring into the MT candidate selection process. We train separate English and Spanish sentiment classifiers, then, using n-best candidates generated by …
Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay between language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less studied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annot…
HausaMovieReview: A Benchmark Dataset for Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource African Language
Federal University Dutsin-Ma（杜钦马联邦大学）；Aliko Dangote University of Science and Technology（阿利科·丹格特科技大学）；Northwest University（西北大学）；Bayero University Kano（卡诺巴耶罗大学）
BanglaASTE: A Novel Framework for Aspect-Sentiment-Opinion Extraction in Bangla E-commerce Reviews Using Ensemble Deep Learning
Department of Computer Science；Engineering Chittagong University of Engineering；Department of Information Technology Washington University of Science \& Technology 2900 Eisenhower Ave, Alexandria, VA 22314, United States；Department of Information Systems Central Michigan University 1200 S. Franklin St. Mount Pleasant, Mich. 48859
The College of New Jersey（新泽西学院）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
With the advent of informal electronic communications such as social media, colloquial languages that were historically unwritten are being written for the first time in heavily code-switched environments. We present a method for inducing portions of translation lexicons through the use of expert knowledge in these settings where there are approximately zero resources available other than a language informant, potentially not even large amounts of monolingual data. We investigate inducing a Moroccan Darija-English translation lexicon via French loanwords bridging into English and find that a u…
Smart Persian Medical Assistant Group（智能波斯医疗助理小组）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
We have released Sina-BERT, a language model pre-trained on BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) to address the lack of a high-quality Persian language model in the medical domain. SINA-BERT utilizes pre-training on a large-scale corpus of medical contents including formal and informal texts collected from a variety of online resources in order to improve the performance on health-care related tasks. We employ SINA-BERT to complete following representative tasks: categorization of medical questions, medical sentiment analysis, and medical question retrieval. For each task, we have developed Persian anno…
IndoBERT-Relevancy: A Context-Conditioned Relevancy Classifier for Indonesian Text
SocialX；Center of Excellence SAKTI, Research Institute Intelligent Business & Sustainable Economy, Telkom University（卓越中心SAKTI，智能商业与可持续经济研究所，特尔康大学）；Biomedical Engineering Study Program, School of Electrical Engineering, Telkom University（生物医学工程专业，电气工程学院，特尔康大学）；Research Center for Smart Mechatronics, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN)（智能机电一体化研究中心，国家研究与创新署（BRIN））
BJIT Limited（BJIT有限公司）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
Text classification has been one of the earliest problems in NLP. Over time the scope of application areas has broadened and the difficulty of dealing with new areas (e.g., noisy social media content) has increased. The problem-solving strategy switched from classical machine learning to deep learning algorithms. One of the recent deep neural network architecture is the Transformer. Models designed with this type of network and its variants recently showed their success in many downstream natural language processing tasks, especially for resource-rich languages, e.g., English. However, these m…
In this paper, we propose Stacked DeBERT, short for Stacked Denoising Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This novel model improves robustness in incomplete data, when compared to existing systems, by designing a novel encoding scheme in BERT, a powerful language representation model solely based on attention mechanisms. Incomplete data in natural language processing refer to text with missing or incorrect words, and its presence can hinder the performance of current models that were not implemented to withstand such noises, but must still perform well even under duress. T…
