Targeted Sentiment Analysis (TSA) is a central task for generating insights from consumer reviews. Such content is extremely diverse, with sites like Amazon or Yelp containing reviews on products and businesses from many different domains. A real-world TSA system should gracefully handle that diversity. This can be achieved by a multi-domain model -- one that is robust to the domain of the analyzed texts, and performs well on various domains. To address this scenario, we present a multi-domain TSA system based on augmenting a given training set with diverse weak labels from assorted domains. These are obtained through self-training on the Yelp reviews corpus. Extensive experiments with our approach on three evaluation datasets across different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. We further analyze how restrictions imposed on the available labeled data affect the performance, and compare the proposed method to the costly alternative of manually gathering diverse TSA labeled data. Our results and analysis show that our approach is a promising step towards a practical domain-robust TSA system.
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Targeted sentiment analysis is the task of jointly predicting target entities and their associated sentiment information. Existing research efforts mostly regard this joint task as a sequence labeling problem, building models that can capture explicit structures in the output space. However, the importance of capturing implicit global structural information that resides in the input space is largely unexplored. In this work, we argue that both types of information (implicit and explicit structural information) are crucial for building a successful targeted sentiment analysis model. Our experim…
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Since previous studies on open-domain targeted sentiment analysis are limited in dataset domain variety and sentence level, we propose a novel dataset consisting of 6,013 human-labeled data to extend the data domains in topics of interest and document level. Furthermore, we offer a nested target annotation schema to extract the complete sentiment information in documents, boosting the practicality and effectiveness of open-domain targeted sentiment analysis. Moreover, we leverage the pre-trained model BART in a sequence-to-sequence generation method for the task. Benchmark results show that th…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；School of Computing and Information Systems（计算与信息系统学院）
While neural networks have been shown to achieve impressive results for sentence-level sentiment analysis, targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis (TABSA) --- extraction of fine-grained opinion polarity w.r.t. a pre-defined set of aspects --- remains a difficult task. Motivated by recent advances in memory-augmented models for machine reading, we propose a novel architecture, utilising external "memory chains" with a delayed memory update mechanism to track entities. On a TABSA task, the proposed model demonstrates substantial improvements over state-of-the-art approaches, including those usi…
Targeted sentiment analysis (TSA), also known as aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA), aims at detecting fine-grained sentiment polarity towards targets in a given opinion document. Due to the lack of labeled datasets and effective technology, TSA had been intractable for many years. The newly released datasets and the rapid development of deep learning technologies are key enablers for the recent significant progress made in this area. However, the TSA tasks have been defined in various ways with different understandings towards basic concepts like `target' and `aspect'. In this paper, we c…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Bloomsbury AI；University of Warwick（华威大学）
In this paper, we introduce the task of targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis. The goal is to extract fine-grained information with respect to entities mentioned in user comments. This work extends both aspect-based sentiment analysis that assumes a single entity per document and targeted sentiment analysis that assumes a single sentiment towards a target entity. In particular, we identify the sentiment towards each aspect of one or more entities. As a testbed for this task, we introduce the SentiHood dataset, extracted from a question answering (QA) platform where urban neighbourhoods are …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；The 30th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation（中国电子科技集团第三十研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
The majority of work in targeted sentiment analysis has concentrated on finding better methods to improve the overall results. Within this paper we show that these models are not robust to linguistic phenomena, specifically negation and speculation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning method to incorporate information from syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks, including negation and speculation scope detection, to create English-language models that are more robust to these phenomena. Further we create two challenge datasets to evaluate model performance on negated and speculativ…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Open-domain targeted sentiment analysis aims to detect opinion targets along with their sentiment polarities from a sentence. Prior work typically formulates this task as a sequence tagging problem. However, such formulation suffers from problems such as huge search space and sentiment inconsistency. To address these problems, we propose a span-based extract-then-classify framework, where multiple opinion targets are directly extracted from the sentence under the supervision of target span boundaries, and corresponding polarities are then classified using their span representations. We further…
Targeted Sentiment Analysis aims to extract sentiment towards a particular target from a given text. It is a field that is attracting attention due to the increasing accessibility of the Internet, which leads people to generate an enormous amount of data. Sentiment analysis, which in general requires annotated data for training, is a well-researched area for widely studied languages such as English. For low-resource languages such as Turkish, there is a lack of such annotated data. We present an annotated Turkish dataset suitable for targeted sentiment analysis. We also propose BERT-based mode…
Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencia, CONICET, UBA（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学国家科学技术研究委员会生理、分子生物学与神经科学研究所）；Facultad de Psicología, UBA（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学心理学学院）；Instituto de Ciencias de la Computación, CONICET, UBA（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学国家科学技术研究委员会计算机科学研究所）
Subjective texts have been studied by several works as they can induce certain behaviours in their users. Most work focuses on user-generated texts in social networks, but some other texts also comprise opinions on certain topics and could influence judgement criteria during political decisions. In this work, we address the task of Targeted Sentiment Analysis for the domain of news headlines, published by the main outlets during the 2019 Argentinean Presidential Elections. For this purpose, we present a polarity dataset of 1,976 headlines mentioning candidates in the 2019 elections at the targ…
Multimodal sentiment analysis has currently identified its significance in a variety of domains. For the purpose of sentiment analysis, different aspects of distinguishing modalities, which correspond to one target, are processed and analyzed. In this work, we propose the targeted aspect-based multimodal sentiment analysis (TABMSA) for the first time. Furthermore, an attention capsule extraction and multi-head fusion network (EF-Net) on the task of TABMSA is devised. The multi-head attention (MHA) based network and the ResNet-152 are employed to deal with texts and images, respectively. The in…
Fine-grained sentiment analysis attempts to extract sentiment holders, targets and polar expressions and resolve the relationship between them, but progress has been hampered by the difficulty of annotation. Targeted sentiment analysis, on the other hand, is a more narrow task, focusing on extracting sentiment targets and classifying their polarity.In this paper, we explore whether incorporating holder and expression information can improve target extraction and classification and perform experiments on eight English datasets. We conclude that jointly predicting target and polarity BIO labels …
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；University of International Relations（国际关系学院）
Attention-based neural models were employed to detect the different aspects and sentiment polarities of the same target in targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis (TABSA). However, existing methods do not specifically pre-train reasonable embeddings for targets and aspects in TABSA. This may result in targets or aspects having the same vector representations in different contexts and losing the context-dependent information. To address this problem, we propose a novel method to refine the embeddings of targets and aspects. Such pivotal embedding refinement utilizes a sparse coefficient vector…
FCKT: Fine-Grained Cross-Task Knowledge Transfer with Semantic Contrastive Learning for Targeted Sentiment Analysis
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, China（北京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Xidian University, China（西安电子科技大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory, China（中关村实验室）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology, and Research（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and Targeted ASBA (TABSA) allow finer-grained inferences about sentiment to be drawn from the same text, depending on context. For example, a given text can have different targets (e.g., neighborhoods) and different aspects (e.g., price or safety), with different sentiment associated with each target-aspect pair. In this paper, we investigate whether adding context to self-attention models improves performance on (T)ABSA. We propose two variants of Context-Guided BERT (CG-BERT) that learn to distribute attention under different contexts. We first adapt a …
Breaking BERT: Gradient Attack on Twitter Sentiment Analysis for Targeted Misclassification
School of Computer Science Engineering and Information Systems, Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工学院计算机科学工程与信息系统学院）；Center for AI Research (CAIR), University of Agder(UiA)（阿格德大学人工智能研究中心）；College of Computer Science and Information Technology, IAU（IAU计算机科学与信息技术学院）
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Sentiment lexicons are instrumental for sentiment analysis. One can use a set of sentiment words provided in a sentiment lexicon and a lexicon-based classifier to perform sentiment classification. One major issue with this approach is that many sentiment words are domain dependent. That is, they may be positive in some domains but negative in some others. We refer to this problem as domain polarity-changes of words. Detecting such words and correcting their sentiment for an application domain is very important. In this paper, we propose a graph-based technique to tackle this problem. Experimen…
National Library of Sweden（瑞典国家图书馆）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
Structured sentiment analysis attempts to extract full opinion tuples from a text, but over time this task has been subdivided into smaller and smaller sub-tasks, e,g,, target extraction or targeted polarity classification. We argue that this division has become counterproductive and propose a new unified framework to remedy the situation. We cast the structured sentiment problem as dependency graph parsing, where the nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and the arcs are the relations between them. We perform experiments on five datasets in four languages (English, No…
University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；University of Colombo（科伦坡大学）
Analyzing the sentiments of legal opinions available in Legal Opinion Texts can facilitate several use cases such as legal judgement prediction, contradictory statements identification and party-based sentiment analysis. However, the task of developing a legal domain specific sentiment annotator is challenging due to resource constraints such as lack of domain specific labelled data and domain expertise. In this study, we propose novel techniques that can be used to develop a sentiment annotator for the legal domain while minimizing the need for manual annotations of data.
This paper aims at an aspect sentiment model for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focused on micro reviews. This task is important in order to understand short reviews majority of the users write, while existing topic models are targeted for expert-level long reviews with sufficient co-occurrence patterns to observe. Current methods on aggregating micro reviews using metadata information may not be effective as well due to metadata absence, topical heterogeneity, and cold start problems. To this end, we propose a model called Micro Aspect Sentiment Model (MicroASM). MicroASM is based on …
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 …
Increasing attention has been drawn to the sentiment analysis of financial documents. The most popular examples of such documents include analyst reports and economic news, the analysis of which is frequently used to capture the trends in market sentiments. On the other hand, the significance of the role sentiment analysis plays in the financial domain has given rise to the efforts to construct a financial domain-specific sentiment lexicon. Sentiment lexicons lend a hand for solving various text mining tasks, such as unsupervised classification of text data, while alleviating the arduous human…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
This paper focuses on learning domain-oriented language models driven by end tasks, which aims to combine the worlds of both general-purpose language models (such as ELMo and BERT) and domain-specific language understanding. We propose DomBERT, an extension of BERT to learn from both in-domain corpus and relevant domain corpora. This helps in learning domain language models with low-resources. Experiments are conducted on an assortment of tasks in aspect-based sentiment analysis, demonstrating promising results.
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
This paper focuses on the automatic extraction of domain-specific sentiment word (DSSW), which is a fundamental subtask of sentiment analysis. Most previous work utilizes manual patterns for this task. However, the performance of those methods highly relies on the labelled patterns or selected seeds. In order to overcome the above problem, this paper presents an automatic framework to detect large-scale domain-specific patterns for DSSW extraction. To this end, sentiment seeds are extracted from massive dataset of user comments. Subsequently, these sentiment seeds are expanded by synonyms usin…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
We introduce FinLin, a novel corpus containing investor reports, company reports, news articles, and microblogs from StockTwits, targeting multiple entities stemming from the automobile industry and covering a 3-month period. FinLin was annotated with a sentiment score and a relevance score in the range [-1.0, 1.0] and [0.0, 1.0], respectively. The annotations also include the text spans selected for the sentiment, thus, providing additional insight into the annotators' reasoning. Overall, FinLin aims to complement the current knowledge by providing a novel and publicly available financial sen…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Cross-domain sentiment analysis has received significant attention in recent years, prompted by the need to combat the domain gap between different applications that make use of sentiment analysis. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on this task by exploring the role of external commonsense knowledge. We introduce a new framework, KinGDOM, which utilizes the ConceptNet knowledge graph to enrich the semantics of a document by providing both domain-specific and domain-general background concepts. These concepts are learned by training a graph convolutional autoencoder that leverages inte…
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 …
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机技术研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学教育部计算语言学重点实验室）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task which aims to extract the aspects from sentences and identify their corresponding sentiments. Aspect term extraction (ATE) is the crucial step for ABSA. Due to the expensive annotation for aspect terms, we often lack labeled target domain data for fine-tuning. To address this problem, many approaches have been proposed recently to transfer common knowledge in an unsupervised way, but such methods have too many modules and require expensive multi-stage preprocessing. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective…
Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore（三星印度研发中心-班加罗尔）
Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) is a technique used in overcoming catastrophic forgetting between successive tasks trained on a neural network. We use this phenomenon of information sharing between tasks for domain adaptation. Training data for tasks such as sentiment analysis (SA) may not be fairly represented across multiple domains. Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to build algorithms that leverage information from source domains to facilitate performance on an unseen target domain. We propose a model-independent framework - Sequential Domain Adaptation (SDA). SDA draws on EWC for training on…
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Target-based sentiment analysis or aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) refers to addressing various sentiment analysis tasks at a fine-grained level, which includes but is not limited to aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and opinion extraction. There exist many solvers of the above individual subtasks or a combination of two subtasks, and they can work together to tell a complete story, i.e. the discussed aspect, the sentiment on it, and the cause of the sentiment. However, no previous ABSA research tried to provide a complete solution in one shot. In this paper, we introd…
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…
LORIA UMR 7503（洛林信息学及其应用研究实验室）；University of Lorraine（洛林大学）
Textual sentiment analysis and emotion detection consists in retrieving the sentiment or emotion carried by a text or document. This task can be useful in many domains: opinion mining, prediction, feedbacks, etc. However, building a general purpose tool for doing sentiment analysis and emotion detection raises a number of issues, theoretical issues like the dependence to the domain or to the language but also pratical issues like the emotion representation for interoperability. In this paper we present our sentiment/emotion analysis tools, the way we propose to circumvent the di culties and th…
Samsung Research Institute Bangalore（三星研究院班加罗尔分院）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；IITB-Monash Research Academy（印度理工学院孟买分校-莫纳什大学研究院）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61部门）
Cross-domain sentiment analysis (CDSA) helps to address the problem of data scarcity in scenarios where labelled data for a domain (known as the target domain) is unavailable or insufficient. However, the decision to choose a domain (known as the source domain) to leverage from is, at best, intuitive. In this paper, we investigate text similarity metrics to facilitate source domain selection for CDSA. We report results on 20 domains (all possible pairs) using 11 similarity metrics. Specifically, we compare CDSA performance with these metrics for different domain-pairs to enable the selection o…
Access to word-sentiment associations is useful for many applications, including sentiment analysis, stance detection, and linguistic analysis. However, manually assigning fine-grained sentiment association scores to words has many challenges with respect to keeping annotations consistent. We apply the annotation technique of Best-Worst Scaling to obtain real-valued sentiment association scores for words and phrases in three different domains: general English, English Twitter, and Arabic Twitter. We show that on all three domains the ranking of words by sentiment remains remarkably consistent …
Covid-19 has spread across the world and several vaccines have been developed to counter its surge. To identify the correct sentiments associated with the vaccines from social media posts, we fine-tune various state-of-the-art pre-trained transformer models on tweets associated with Covid-19 vaccines. Specifically, we use the recently introduced state-of-the-art pre-trained transformer models RoBERTa, XLNet and BERT, and the domain-specific transformer models CT-BERT and BERTweet that are pre-trained on Covid-19 tweets. We further explore the option of text augmentation by oversampling using L…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Sentiment analysis (SA) is an important research area in cognitive computation-thus in-depth studies of patterns of sentiment analysis are necessary. At present, rich resource data-based SA has been well developed, while the more challenging and practical multi-source unsupervised SA (i.e. a target domain SA by transferring from multiple source domains) is seldom studied. The challenges behind this problem mainly locate in the lack of supervision information, the semantic gaps among domains (i.e., domain shifts), and the loss of knowledge. However, existing methods either lack the distinguisha…
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…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (MS-UDA) for sentiment analysis (SA) aims to leverage useful information in multiple source domains to help do SA in an unlabeled target domain that has no supervised information. Existing algorithms of MS-UDA either only exploit the shared features, i.e., the domain-invariant information, or based on some weak assumption in NLP, e.g., smoothness assumption. To avoid these problems, we propose two transfer learning frameworks based on the multi-source domain adaptation methodology for SA by combining the source hypotheses to derive a good target hypo…
Singapore Institute of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), a popular research area in NLP has two distinct parts -- aspect extraction (AE) and labeling the aspects with sentiment polarity (ALSA). Although distinct, these two tasks are highly correlated. The work primarily hypothesize that transferring knowledge from a pre-trained AE model can benefit the performance of ALSA models. Based on this hypothesis, word embeddings are obtained during AE and subsequently, feed that to the ALSA model. Empirically, this work show that the added information significantly improves the performance of three different baseline …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）
Cross-domain sentiment analysis aims to predict the sentiment of texts in the target domain using the model trained on the source domain to cope with the scarcity of labeled data. Previous studies are mostly cross-entropy-based methods for the task, which suffer from instability and poor generalization. In this paper, we explore contrastive learning on the cross-domain sentiment analysis task. We propose a modified contrastive objective with in-batch negative samples so that the sentence representations from the same class will be pushed close while those from the different classes become furt…
Aylien Ltd.（Aylien有限公司）；National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
Domain adaptation is important in sentiment analysis as sentiment-indicating words vary between domains. Recently, multi-domain adaptation has become more pervasive, but existing approaches train on all available source domains including dissimilar ones. However, the selection of appropriate training data is as important as the choice of algorithm. We undertake -- to our knowledge for the first time -- an extensive study of domain similarity metrics in the context of sentiment analysis and propose novel representations, metrics, and a new scope for data selection. We evaluate the proposed meth…
Indian Institute of Technology Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；Kyoto University（京都大学）
In this paper, through multi-task ensemble framework we address three problems of emotion and sentiment analysis i.e. "emotion classification & intensity", "valence, arousal & dominance for emotion" and "valence & arousal} for sentiment". The underlying problems cover two granularities (i.e. coarse-grained and fine-grained) and a diverse range of domains (i.e. tweets, Facebook posts, news headlines, blogs, letters etc.). The ensemble model aims to leverage the learned representations of three deep learning models (i.e. CNN, LSTM and GRU) and a hand-crafted feature representation for the predic…
(T)ACSA tasks, including aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and targeted aspect-category sentiment analysis (TACSA), aims at identifying sentiment polarity on predefined categories. Incremental learning on new categories is necessary for (T)ACSA real applications. Though current multi-task learning models achieve good performance in (T)ACSA tasks, they suffer from catastrophic forgetting problems in (T)ACSA incremental learning tasks. In this paper, to make multi-task learning feasible for incremental learning, we proposed Category Name Embedding network (CNE-net). We set both encoder a…
