Sentiment analysis, especially for long documents, plausibly requires methods capturing complex linguistics structures. To accommodate this, we propose a novel framework to exploit task-related discourse for the task of sentiment analysis. More specifically, we are combining the large-scale, sentiment-dependent MEGA-DT treebank with a novel neural architecture for sentiment prediction, based on a hybrid TreeLSTM hierarchical attention model. Experiments show that our framework using sentiment-related discourse augmentations for sentiment prediction enhances the overall performance for long documents, even beyond previous approaches using well-established discourse parsers trained on human annotated data. We show that a simple ensemble approach can further enhance performance by selectively using discourse, depending on the document length.
Prominent applications of sentiment analysis are countless, covering areas such as marketing, customer service and communication. The conventional bag-of-words approach for measuring sentiment merely counts term frequencies; however, it neglects the position of the terms within the discourse. As a remedy, we develop a discourse-aware method that builds upon the discourse structure of documents. For this purpose, we utilize rhetorical structure theory to label (sub-)clauses according to their hierarchical relationships and then assign polarity scores to individual leaves. To learn from the resu…
In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce and the model is expected to perform in the zero or few shot setting. Recently, several works have shown that continual pretraining or performing a second phase of pretraining (inter-training) which is better aligned with the downstream task, can lead to improved results, especially in the scarce data setting. Here, we propose to leverage sentiment-carrying di…
Discourse structure is the hidden link between surface features and document-level properties, such as sentiment polarity. We show that the discourse analyses produced by Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers can improve document-level sentiment analysis, via composition of local information up the discourse tree. First, we show that reweighting discourse units according to their position in a dependency representation of the rhetorical structure can yield substantial improvements on lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Next, we present a recursive neural network over the RST structure, which…
Faculty of Engineering, University of Bonab（博纳布大学工程学院）
Sentiment analysis attempts to identify, extract and quantify affective states and subjective information from various types of data such as text, audio, and video. Many approaches have been proposed to extract the sentiment of individuals from documents written in natural languages in recent years. The majority of these approaches have focused on English, while resource-lean languages such as Persian suffer from the lack of research work and language resources. Due to this gap in Persian, the current work is accomplished to introduce new methods for sentiment analysis which have been applied …
Emotion Recognition for Low-Resource Turkish: Fine-Tuning BERTurk on TREMO and Testing on Xenophobic Political Discourse
New Media and Communications Social Sciences University of Ankara (ASBU)（新媒体与传播科学大学安卡拉大学（ASBU））；Department of Computer Science Gazi University（计算机科学系加齐大学）
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre（阿雷格里港联邦健康科学大学）
2018's Brazilian presidential elections highlighted the influence of alternative media and social networks, such as Twitter. In this work, we perform an analysis covering politically motivated discourses related to the second round in Brazilian elections. In order to verify whether similar discourses reinforce group engagement to personal beliefs, we collected a set of tweets related to political hashtags at that moment. To this end, we have used a combination of topic modeling approach with opinion mining techniques to analyze the motivated political discourses. Using SentiLex-PT, a Portugues…
Sentiment analysis has been widely used by businesses for social media opinion mining, especially in the financial services industry, where customers' feedbacks are critical for companies. Recent progress of neural network models has achieved remarkable performance on sentiment classification, while the lack of classification interpretation may raise the trustworthy and many other issues in practice. In this work, we study the problem of improving the explainability of existing sentiment classifiers. We propose two data augmentation methods that create additional training examples to help impr…
The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on social media can inform us on how we are conceptualizing the pandemic and how we are reacting to its development. This paper provides an extensive explorative analysis of how the discourse about Covid-19 reported on Twitter changes through time, focusing on the first wave of this pandemic. Based on an extensive corpus of tweets (produced between 20th March and 1st July 2020) first we show how the topics associated with the development of the pandemic changed through time, using topic modeling. Second, we show how the sentimen…
Erasmus University Rotterdam（鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯大学）；Bucharest Univ. of Economic Studies（布加勒斯特经济研究大学）
Data augmentation is a way to increase the diversity of available data by applying constrained transformations on the original data. This strategy has been widely used in image classification but has to the best of our knowledge not yet been used in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). ABSA is a text analysis technique that determines aspects and their associated sentiment in opinionated text. In this paper, we investigate the effect of data augmentation on a state-of-the-art hybrid approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis (HAABSA). We apply modified versions of easy data augmentation (…
This thesis explores the ways by how people express their opinions on German Twitter, examines current approaches to automatic mining of these feelings, and proposes novel methods, which outperform state-of-the-art techniques. For this purpose, I introduce a new corpus of German tweets that have been manually annotated with sentiments, their targets and holders, as well as polar terms and their contextual modifiers. Using these data, I explore four major areas of sentiment research: (i) generation of sentiment lexicons, (ii) fine-grained opinion mining, (iii) message-level polarity classificat…
This paper discusses the approach taken by the UWaterloo team to arrive at a solution for the Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis problem posed by Task 5 of SemEval 2017. The paper describes the document vectorization and sentiment score prediction techniques used, as well as the design and implementation decisions taken while building the system for this task. The system uses text vectorization models, such as N-gram, TF-IDF and paragraph embeddings, coupled with regression model variants to predict the sentiment scores. Amongst the methods examined, unigrams and bigrams coupled with simple linea…
Discourse parsing is an essential upstream task in Natural Language Processing with strong implications for many real-world applications. Despite its widely recognized role, most recent discourse parsers (and consequently downstream tasks) still rely on small-scale human-annotated discourse treebanks, trying to infer general-purpose discourse structures from very limited data in a few narrow domains. To overcome this dire situation and allow discourse parsers to be trained on larger, more diverse and domain-independent datasets, we propose a framework to generate "silver-standard" discourse tr…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which focuses on detecting the sentiment polarity towards the aspect in a sentence. However, it is always sensitive to the multi-aspect challenge, where features of multiple aspects in a sentence will affect each other. To mitigate this issue, we design a novel training framework, called Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation (C3 DA), which leverages an in-domain generator to construct more multi-aspect samples and then boosts the robustness of ABSA models via contrastive learning on these generated data. In…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The study aims to understand Twitter users' discourse and psychological reactions to COVID-19. We use machine learning techniques to analyze about 1.9 million Tweets (written in English) related to coronavirus collected from January 23 to March 7, 2020. A total of salient 11 topics are identified and then categorized into ten themes, including "updates about confirmed cases," "COVID-19 related death," "cases outside China (worldwide)," "COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea," "early signs of the outbreak in New York," "Diamond Princess cruise," "economic impact," "Preventive measures," "authorities…
Tweets are specific text data when compared to general text. Although sentiment analysis over tweets has become very popular in the last decade for English, it is still difficult to find huge annotated corpora for non-English languages. The recent rise of the transformer models in Natural Language Processing allows to achieve unparalleled performances in many tasks, but these models need a consequent quantity of text to adapt to the tweet domain. We propose the use of a multilingual transformer model, that we pre-train over English tweets and apply data-augmentation using automatic translation…
Sentiment analysis is crucial for the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI). Sentiment understanding can help AI to replicate human language and discourse. Studying the formation and response of sentiment state from well-trained Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) can help make the interaction between humans and AI more intelligent. In this paper, a sentiment analysis pipeline is first carried out with respect to real-world multi-party conversations - that is, service calls. Based on the acoustic and linguistic features extracted from the source information, a novel aggregated method…
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba（科尔多瓦国立大学）；CONICET（阿根廷国家科学技术研究委员会）
In this article we describe our participation in TASS 2019, a shared task aimed at the detection of sentiment polarity of Spanish tweets. We combined different representations such as bag-of-words, bag-of-characters, and tweet embeddings. In particular, we trained robust subword-aware word embeddings and computed tweet representations using a weighted-averaging strategy. We also used two data augmentation techniques to deal with data scarcity: two-way translation augmentation, and instance crossover augmentation, a novel technique that generates new instances by combining halves of tweets. In …
Given the growing assortment of sentiment measuring instruments, it is imperative to understand which aspects of sentiment dictionaries contribute to both their classification accuracy and their ability to provide richer understanding of texts. Here, we perform detailed, quantitative tests and qualitative assessments of 6 dictionary-based methods applied, and briefly examine a further 20 methods. We show that while inappropriate for sentences, dictionary-based methods are generally robust in their classification accuracy for longer texts. Stories often following distinct emotional trajectories…
Adaptive Data Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学Insight数据分析中心）；University of Kurdistan（库尔德斯坦大学）
本文针对 Central Kurdish 低资源情感分析，构建了专用数据集，探索了经典机器学习与神经网络技术，并采用迁移学习利用预训练模型进行数据增强，实验证明该方法在困难任务上仍取得了较高的 F$_1$ 分数和准确率。
STAR: Stepwise Task Augmentation with Relation Learning for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Lingnan University（岭大）；The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼大学）
Label-Consistent Data Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using LLM Agents
Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, University of Bonn, Germany（波恩-阿赫恩国际信息科技中心，波恩大学，德国）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Germany（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所，德国）
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Our day-to-day life has always been influenced by what people think. Ideas and opinions of others have always affected our own opinions. The explosion of Web 2.0 has led to increased activity in Podcasting, Blogging, Tagging, Contributing to RSS, Social Bookmarking, and Social Networking. As a result there has been an eruption of interest in people to mine these vast resources of data for opinions. Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining is the computational treatment of opinions, sentiments and subjectivity of text. In this report, we take a look at the various challenges and applications of Sen…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
A sentence may express sentiments on multiple aspects. When these aspects are associated with different sentiment polarities, a model's accuracy is often adversely affected. We observe that multiple aspects in such hard sentences are mostly expressed through multiple clauses, or formally known as elementary discourse units (EDUs), and one EDU tends to express a single aspect with unitary sentiment towards that aspect. In this paper, we propose to consider EDU boundaries in sentence modeling, with attentions at both word and EDU levels. Specifically, we highlight sentiment-bearing words in EDU …
A Transformer-Based Cross-Platform Analysis of Public Discourse on the 15-Minute City Paradigm
1 College of Science；Engineering, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA Email；3 Texas A\&M Transportation Institute, Texas A\&M University, Houston, Texas, USA Email
RST-style discourse parsing plays a vital role in many NLP tasks, revealing the underlying semantic/pragmatic structure of potentially complex and diverse documents. Despite its importance, one of the most prevailing limitations in modern day discourse parsing is the lack of large-scale datasets. To overcome the data sparsity issue, distantly supervised approaches from tasks like sentiment analysis and summarization have been recently proposed. Here, we extend this line of research by exploiting distant supervision from topic segmentation, which can arguably provide a strong and oftentimes com…
The lack of large and diverse discourse treebanks hinders the application of data-driven approaches, such as deep-learning, to RST-style discourse parsing. In this work, we present a novel scalable methodology to automatically generate discourse treebanks using distant supervision from sentiment-annotated datasets, creating and publishing MEGA-DT, a new large-scale discourse-annotated corpus. Our approach generates discourse trees incorporating structure and nuclearity for documents of arbitrary length by relying on an efficient heuristic beam-search strategy, extended with a stochastic compon…
Clarifying Misconceptions in COVID-19 Vaccine Sentiment and Stance Analysis and Their Implications for Vaccine Hesitancy Mitigation: A Systematic Review
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Rio de Janeiro State（里约热内卢州立大学）
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we examine the role of social messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye (i.e. athletes, politicians, news personnel) in determining overall public discourse direction. We harvested approximately 13 million tweets ranging from 1 January 2020 to 1 March 2022. The sentiment was calculated for each tweet…
Data-driven statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques leverage large amounts of language data to build models that can understand language. However, most language data reflect the public discourse at the time the data was produced, and hence NLP models are susceptible to learning incidental associations around named referents at a particular point in time, in addition to general linguistic meaning. An NLP system designed to model notions such as sentiment and toxicity should ideally produce scores that are independent of the identity of such entities mentioned in text and their …
Identifying and communicating relationships between causes and effects is important for understanding our world, but is affected by language structure, cognitive and emotional biases, and the properties of the communication medium. Despite the increasing importance of social media, much remains unknown about causal statements made online. To study real-world causal attribution, we extract a large-scale corpus of causal statements made on the Twitter social network platform as well as a comparable random control corpus. We compare causal and control statements using statistical language and sen…
Discourse parsing could not yet take full advantage of the neural NLP revolution, mostly due to the lack of annotated datasets. We propose a novel approach that uses distant supervision on an auxiliary task (sentiment classification), to generate abundant data for RST-style discourse structure prediction. Our approach combines a neural variant of multiple-instance learning, using document-level supervision, with an optimal CKY-style tree generation algorithm. In a series of experiments, we train a discourse parser (for only structure prediction) on our automatically generated dataset and compa…
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 consider the task of fine-grained sentiment analysis from the perspective of multiple instance learning (MIL). Our neural model is trained on document sentiment labels, and learns to predict the sentiment of text segments, i.e. sentences or elementary discourse units (EDUs), without segment-level supervision. We introduce an attention-based polarity scoring method for identifying positive and negative text snippets and a new dataset which we call SPOT (as shorthand for Segment-level POlariTy annotations) for evaluating MIL-style sentiment models like ours. Experimental results demonstrate s…
Person-to-person evaluations are prevalent in all kinds of discourse and important for establishing reputations, building social bonds, and shaping public opinion. Such evaluations can be analyzed separately using signed social networks and textual sentiment analysis, but this misses the rich interactions between language and social context. To capture such interactions, we develop a model that predicts individual A's opinion of individual B by synthesizing information from the signed social network in which A and B are embedded with sentiment analysis of the evaluative texts relating A to B. …
