Hashtag segmentation, also known as hashtag decomposition, is a common step in preprocessing pipelines for social media datasets. It usually precedes tasks such as sentiment analysis and hate speech detection. For sentiment analysis in medium to low-resourced languages, previous research has demonstrated that a multilingual approach that resorts to machine translation can be competitive or superior to previous approaches to the task. We develop a zero-shot hashtag segmentation framework and demonstrate how it can be used to improve the accuracy of multilingual sentiment analysis pipelines. Our zero-shot framework establishes a new state-of-the-art for hashtag segmentation datasets, surpassing even previous approaches that relied on feature engineering and language models trained on in-domain data.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) typically requires in-domain annotated data for supervised training/fine-tuning. It is a big challenge to scale ABSA to a large number of new domains. This paper aims to train a unified model that can perform zero-shot ABSA without using any annotated data for a new domain. We propose a method called contrastive post-training on review Natural Language Inference (CORN). Later ABSA tasks can be cast into NLI for zero-shot transfer. We evaluate CORN on ABSA tasks, ranging from aspect extraction (AE), aspect sentiment classification (ASC), to end-to-end aspect-based sentiment analysis (E2E ABSA), which show ABSA can be conducted without any human annotated ABSA data.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Multilingual Word Embeddings (MWEs) represent words from multiple languages in a single distributional vector space. Unsupervised MWE (UMWE) methods acquire multilingual embeddings without cross-lingual supervision, which is a significant advantage over traditional supervised approaches and opens many new possibilities for low-resource languages. Prior art for learning UMWEs, however, merely relies on a number of independently trained Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embeddings (UBWEs) to obtain multilingual embeddings. These methods fail to leverage the interdependencies that exist among many languages. To address this shortcoming, we propose a fully unsupervised framework for learning MWEs that directly exploits the relations between all language pairs. Our model substantially outperforms previous approaches in the experiments on multilingual word translation and cross-lingual word similarity. In addition, our model even beats supervised approaches trained with cross-lingual resources.
The emerging technique of deep learning has been widely applied in many different areas. However, when adopted in a certain specific domain, this technique should be combined with domain knowledge to improve efficiency and accuracy. In particular, when analyzing the applications of deep learning in sentiment analysis, we found that the current approaches are suffering from the following drawbacks: (i) the existing works have not paid much attention to the importance of different types of sentiment terms, which is an important concept in this area; and (ii) the loss function currently employed does not well reflect the degree of error of sentiment misclassification. To overcome such problem, we propose to combine domain knowledge with deep learning. Our proposal includes using sentiment scores, learnt by regression, to augment training data; and introducing penalty matrix for enhancing the loss function of cross entropy. When experimented, we achieved a significant improvement in classification results.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
Most existing sentiment analysis approaches heavily rely on a large amount of labeled data that usually involve time-consuming and error-prone manual annotations. The distribution of this labeled data is significantly imbalanced among languages, e.g., more English texts are labeled than texts in other languages, which presents a major challenge to cross-lingual sentiment analysis. There have been several cross-lingual representation learning techniques that transfer the knowledge learned from a language with abundant labeled examples to another language with much fewer labels. Their performance, however, is usually limited due to the imperfect quality of machine translation and the scarce signal that bridges two languages. In this paper, we employ emojis, a ubiquitous and emotional language, as a new bridge for sentiment analysis across languages. Specifically, we propose a semi-supervised representation learning approach through the task of emoji prediction to learn cross-lingual representations of text that can capture both semantic and sentiment information. The learned representations are then utilized to facilitate cross-lingual sentiment classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on a representative Amazon review data set that covers three languages and three domains.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.
The Rohingya Movement and Crisis caused a huge uproar in the political and economic state of Bangladesh. Refugee movement is a recurring event and a large amount of data in the form of opinions remains on social media such as Facebook, with very little analysis done on them.To analyse the comments based on all Rohingya related posts, we had to create and modify a classifier based on the Support Vector Machine algorithm. The code is implemented in python and uses scikit-learn library. A dataset on Rohingya analysis is not currently available so we had to use our own data set of 2500 positive and 2500 negative comments. We specifically used a support vector machine with linear kernel. A previous experiment was performed by us on the same dataset using the naive bayes algorithm, but that did not yield impressive results.
Sentiment analysis is a key component in various text mining applications. Numerous sentiment classification techniques, including conventional and deep learning-based methods, have been proposed in the literature. In most existing methods, a high-quality training set is assumed to be given. Nevertheless, constructing a high-quality training set that consists of highly accurate labels is challenging in real applications. This difficulty stems from the fact that text samples usually contain complex sentiment representations, and their annotation is subjective. We address this challenge in this study by leveraging a new labeling strategy and utilizing a two-level long short-term memory network to construct a sentiment classifier. Lexical cues are useful for sentiment analysis, and they have been utilized in conventional studies. For example, polar and privative words play important roles in sentiment analysis. A new encoding strategy, that is, $\rho$-hot encoding, is proposed to alleviate the drawbacks of one-hot encoding and thus effectively incorporate useful lexical cues. We compile three Chinese data sets on the basis of our label strategy and proposed methodology. Experiments on the three data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.
Recognizing semantically similar sentences or paragraphs across languages is beneficial for many tasks, ranging from cross-lingual information retrieval and plagiarism detection to machine translation. Recently proposed methods for predicting cross-lingual semantic similarity of short texts, however, make use of tools and resources (e.g., machine translation systems, syntactic parsers or named entity recognition) that for many languages (or language pairs) do not exist. In contrast, we propose an unsupervised and a very resource-light approach for measuring semantic similarity between texts in different languages. To operate in the bilingual (or multilingual) space, we project continuous word vectors (i.e., word embeddings) from one language to the vector space of the other language via the linear translation model. We then align words according to the similarity of their vectors in the bilingual embedding space and investigate different unsupervised measures of semantic similarity exploiting bilingual embeddings and word alignments. Requiring only a limited-size set of word translation pairs between the languages, the proposed approach is applicable to virtually any pair of languages for which there exists a sufficiently large corpus, required to learn monolingual word embeddings. Experimental results on three different datasets for measuring semantic textual similarity show that our simple resource-light approach reaches performance close to that of supervised and resource intensive methods, displaying stability across different language pairs. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed method on two extrinsic tasks, namely extraction of parallel sentences from comparable corpora and cross lingual plagiarism detection, and show that it yields performance comparable to those of complex resource-intensive state-of-the-art models for the respective tasks.