The performance of text classification has improved tremendously using intelligently engineered neural-based models, especially those injecting categorical metadata as additional information, e.g., using user/product information for sentiment classification. These information have been used to modify parts of the model (e.g., word embeddings, attention mechanisms) such that results can be customized according to the metadata. We observe that current representation methods for categorical metadata, which are devised for human consumption, are not as effective as claimed in popular classification methods, outperformed even by simple concatenation of categorical features in the final layer of the sentence encoder. We conjecture that categorical features are harder to represent for machine use, as available context only indirectly describes the category, and even such context is often scarce (for tail category). To this end, we propose to use basis vectors to effectively incorporate categorical metadata on various parts of a neural-based model. This additionally decreases the number of parameters dramatically, especially when the number of categorical features is large. Extensive experiments on various datasets with different properties are performed and show that through our method, we can represent categorical metadata more effectively to customize parts of the model, including unexplored ones, and increase the performance of the model greatly.
Detecting and aggregating sentiments toward people, organizations, and events expressed in unstructured social media have become critical text mining operations. Early systems detected sentiments over whole passages, whereas more recently, target-specific sentiments have been of greater interest. In this paper, we present MTTDSC, a multi-task target-dependent sentiment classification system that is informed by feature representation learnt for the related auxiliary task of passage-level sentiment classification. The auxiliary task uses a gated recurrent unit (GRU) and pools GRU states, followed by an auxiliary fully-connected layer that outputs passage-level predictions. In the main task, these GRUs contribute auxiliary per-token representations over and above word embeddings. The main task has its own, separate GRUs. The auxiliary and main GRUs send their states to a different fully connected layer, trained for the main task. Extensive experiments using two auxiliary datasets and three benchmark datasets (of which one is new, introduced by us) for the main task demonstrate that MTTDSC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Using word-level sensitivity analysis, we present anecdotal evidence that prior systems can make incorrect target-specific predictions because they miss sentiments expressed by words independent of target.
Aspect-based Opinion Summary (AOS), consisting of aspect discovery and sentiment classification steps, has recently been emerging as one of the most crucial data mining tasks in e-commerce systems. Along this direction, the LDA-based model is considered as a notably suitable approach, since this model offers both topic modeling and sentiment classification. However, unlike traditional topic modeling, in the context of aspect discovery it is often required some initial seed words, whose prior knowledge is not easy to be incorporated into LDA models. Moreover, LDA approaches rely on sampling methods, which need to load the whole corpus into memory, making them hardly scalable. In this research, we study an alternative approach for AOS problem, based on Autoencoding Variational Inference (AVI). Firstly, we introduce the Autoencoding Variational Inference for Aspect Discovery (AVIAD) model, which extends the previous work of Autoencoding Variational Inference for Topic Models (AVITM) to embed prior knowledge of seed words. This work includes enhancement of the previous AVI architecture and also modification of the loss function. Ultimately, we present the Autoencoding Variational Inference for Joint Sentiment/Topic (AVIJST) model. In this model, we substantially extend the AVI model to support the JST model, which performs topic modeling for corresponding sentiment. The experimental results show that our proposed models enjoy higher topic coherent, faster convergence time and better accuracy on sentiment classification, as compared to their LDA-based counterparts.
Sentiment classification and sarcasm detection are both important natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Sentiment is always coupled with sarcasm where intensive emotion is expressed. Nevertheless, most literature considers them as two separate tasks. We argue that knowledge in sarcasm detection can also be beneficial to sentiment classification and vice versa. We show that these two tasks are correlated, and present a multi-task learning-based framework using a deep neural network that models this correlation to improve the performance of both tasks in a multi-task learning setting. Our method outperforms the state of the art by 3-4% in the benchmark dataset.
Text mining is a broad field having sentiment mining as its important constituent in which we try to deduce the behavior of people towards a specific item, merchandise, politics, sports, social media comments, review sites etc. Out of many issues in sentiment mining, analysis and classification, one major issue is that the reviews and comments can be in different languages like English, Arabic, Urdu etc. Handling each language according to its rules is a difficult task. A lot of research work has been done in English Language for sentiment analysis and classification but limited sentiment analysis work is being carried out on other regional languages like Arabic, Urdu and Hindi. In this paper, Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) is used as a platform to execute different classification models for text classification of Roman Urdu text. Reviews dataset has been scrapped from different automobiles sites. These extracted Roman Urdu reviews, containing 1000 positive and 1000 negative reviews, are then saved in WEKA attribute-relation file format (arff) as labeled examples. Training is done on 80% of this data and rest of it is used for testing purpose which is done using different models and results are analyzed in each case. The results show that Multinomial Naive Bayes outperformed Bagging, Deep Neural Network, Decision Tree, Random Forest, AdaBoost, k-NN and SVM Classifiers in terms of more accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure.
Aspect level sentiment classification is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task. To detect the sentiment towards a particular aspect in a sentence, previous studies have developed various attention-based methods for generating aspect-specific sentence representations. However, the attention may inherently introduce noise and downgrade the performance. In this paper, we propose constrained attention networks (CAN), a simple yet effective solution, to regularize the attention for multi-aspect sentiment analysis, which alleviates the drawback of the attention mechanism. Specifically, we introduce orthogonal regularization on multiple aspects and sparse regularization on each single aspect. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We further extend our approach to multi-task settings and outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
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 based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors. We assessed our model's performance and reliability by comparing it with a number of frequently used sentiment analysis tools on five gold standard datasets. Our results show that our model pushes the state of the art further on all datasets in terms of accuracy. We also show that it is possible to get better accuracy after labelling a small sample of the dataset and re-training our model rather than using an unsupervised classifier.
Multi-emotion sentiment classification is a natural language processing (NLP) problem with valuable use cases on real-world data. We demonstrate that large-scale unsupervised language modeling combined with finetuning offers a practical solution to this task on difficult datasets, including those with label class imbalance and domain-specific context. By training an attention-based Transformer network (Vaswani et al. 2017) on 40GB of text (Amazon reviews) (McAuley et al. 2015) and fine-tuning on the training set, our model achieves a 0.69 F1 score on the SemEval Task 1:E-c multi-dimensional emotion classification problem (Mohammad et al. 2018), based on the Plutchik wheel of emotions (Plutchik 1979). These results are competitive with state of the art models, including strong F1 scores on difficult (emotion) categories such as Fear (0.73), Disgust (0.77) and Anger (0.78), as well as competitive results on rare categories such as Anticipation (0.42) and Surprise (0.37). Furthermore, we demonstrate our application on a real world text classification task. We create a narrowly collected text dataset of real tweets on several topics, and show that our finetuned model outperforms general purpose commercially available APIs for sentiment and multidimensional emotion classification on this dataset by a significant margin. We also perform a variety of additional studies, investigating properties of deep learning architectures, datasets and algorithms for achieving practical multidimensional sentiment classification. Overall, we find that unsupervised language modeling and finetuning is a simple framework for achieving high quality results on real-world sentiment classification.
Neural sequence models have achieved great success in sentence-level sentiment classification. However, some models are exceptionally complex or based on expensive features. Some other models recognize the value of existed linguistic resource but utilize it insufficiently. This paper proposes a novel and general method to incorporate lexicon information, including sentiment lexicons(+/-), negation words and intensifiers. Words are annotated in fine-grained and coarse-grained labels. The proposed method first encodes the fine-grained labels into sentiment embedding and concatenates it with word embedding. Second, the coarse-grained labels are utilized to enhance the attention mechanism to give large weight on sentiment-related words. Experimental results show that our method can increase classification accuracy for neural sequence models on both SST-5 and MR dataset. Specifically, the enhanced Bi-LSTM model can even compare with a Tree-LSTM which uses expensive phrase-level annotations. Further analysis shows that in most cases the lexicon resource can offer the right annotations. Besides, the proposed method is capable of overcoming the effect from inevitably wrong annotations.
Aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC) aims at identifying sentiment polarities towards aspects in a sentence, where the aspect can behave as a general Aspect Category (AC) or a specific Aspect Term (AT). However, due to the especially expensive and labor-intensive labeling, existing public corpora in AT-level are all relatively small. Meanwhile, most of the previous methods rely on complicated structures with given scarce data, which largely limits the efficacy of the neural models. In this paper, we exploit a new direction named coarse-to-fine task transfer, which aims to leverage knowledge learned from a rich-resource source domain of the coarse-grained AC task, which is more easily accessible, to improve the learning in a low-resource target domain of the fine-grained AT task. To resolve both the aspect granularity inconsistency and feature mismatch between domains, we propose a Multi-Granularity Alignment Network (MGAN). In MGAN, a novel Coarse2Fine attention guided by an auxiliary task can help the AC task modeling at the same fine-grained level with the AT task. To alleviate the feature false alignment, a contrastive feature alignment method is adopted to align aspect-specific feature representations semantically. In addition, a large-scale multi-domain dataset for the AC task is provided. Empirically, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the MGAN.
In several natural language tasks, labeled sequences are available in separate domains (say, languages), but the goal is to label sequences with mixed domain (such as code-switched text). Or, we may have available models for labeling whole passages (say, with sentiments), which we would like to exploit toward better position-specific label inference (say, target-dependent sentiment annotation). A key characteristic shared across such tasks is that different positions in a primary instance can benefit from different `experts' trained from auxiliary data, but labeled primary instances are scarce, and labeling the best expert for each position entails unacceptable cognitive burden. We propose GITNet, a unified position-sensitive multi-task recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture for such applications. Auxiliary and primary tasks need not share training instances. Auxiliary RNNs are trained over auxiliary instances. A primary instance is also submitted to each auxiliary RNN, but their state sequences are gated and merged into a novel composite state sequence tailored to the primary inference task. Our approach is in sharp contrast to recent multi-task networks like the cross-stitch and sluice network, which do not control state transfer at such fine granularity. We demonstrate the superiority of GIRNet using three applications: sentiment classification of code-switched passages, part-of-speech tagging of code-switched text, and target position-sensitive annotation of sentiment in monolingual passages. In all cases, we establish new state-of-the-art performance beyond recent competitive baselines.
The primary objective of domain adaptation methods is to transfer knowledge from a source domain to a target domain that has similar but different data distributions. Thus, in order to correctly classify the unlabeled target domain samples, the standard approach is to learn a common representation for both source and target domain, thereby indirectly addressing the problem of learning a classifier in the target domain. However, such an approach does not address the task of classification in the target domain directly. In contrast, we propose an approach that directly addresses the problem of learning a classifier in the unlabeled target domain. In particular, we train a classifier to correctly classify the training samples while simultaneously classifying the samples in the target domain in an unsupervised manner. The corresponding model is referred to as Discriminative Encoding for Domain Adaptation (DEDA). We show that this simple approach for performing unsupervised domain adaptation is indeed quite powerful. Our method achieves state of the art results in unsupervised adaptation tasks on various image classification benchmarks. We also obtained state of the art performance on domain adaptation in Amazon reviews sentiment classification dataset. We perform additional experiments when the source data has less labeled examples and also on zero-shot domain adaptation task where no target domain samples are used for training.
First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned, has been widely applied to and attained significant improvement in various tasks in natural language processing, including sentiment classification, text summarization, question answering, dependency parsing, etc. In this paper, we survey through recent works and conduct an introductory summary of the attention mechanism in different NLP problems, aiming to provide our readers with basic knowledge on this widely used method, discuss its different variants for different tasks, explore its association with other techniques in machine learning, and examine methods for evaluating its performance.
Target-based sentiment analysis involves opinion target extraction and target sentiment classification. However, most of the existing works usually studied one of these two sub-tasks alone, which hinders their practical use. This paper aims to solve the complete task of target-based sentiment analysis in an end-to-end fashion, and presents a novel unified model which applies a unified tagging scheme. Our framework involves two stacked recurrent neural networks: The upper one predicts the unified tags to produce the final output results of the primary target-based sentiment analysis; The lower one performs an auxiliary target boundary prediction aiming at guiding the upper network to improve the performance of the primary task. To explore the inter-task dependency, we propose to explicitly model the constrained transitions from target boundaries to target sentiment polarities. We also propose to maintain the sentiment consistency within an opinion target via a gate mechanism which models the relation between the features for the current word and the previous word. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and our framework achieves consistently superior results.
Machine learning models trained on data from the outside world can be corrupted by data poisoning attacks that inject malicious points into the models' training sets. A common defense against these attacks is data sanitization: first filter out anomalous training points before training the model. In this paper, we develop three attacks that can bypass a broad range of common data sanitization defenses, including anomaly detectors based on nearest neighbors, training loss, and singular-value decomposition. By adding just 3% poisoned data, our attacks successfully increase test error on the Enron spam detection dataset from 3% to 24% and on the IMDB sentiment classification dataset from 12% to 29%. In contrast, existing attacks which do not explicitly account for these data sanitization defenses are defeated by them. Our attacks are based on two ideas: (i) we coordinate our attacks to place poisoned points near one another, and (ii) we formulate each attack as a constrained optimization problem, with constraints designed to ensure that the poisoned points evade detection. As this optimization involves solving an expensive bilevel problem, our three attacks correspond to different ways of approximating this problem, based on influence functions; minimax duality; and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Our results underscore the need to develop more robust defenses against data poisoning attacks.
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has been successfully applied in many sequence learning problems. Such as handwriting recognition, image description, natural language processing and video motion analysis. After years of development, researchers have improved the internal structure of the RNN and introduced many variants. Among others, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is one of the most widely used RNN model. However, GRU lacks the capability of adaptively paying attention to certain regions or locations, so that it may cause information redundancy or loss during leaning. In this paper, we propose a RNN model, called Recurrent Attention Unit (RAU), which seamlessly integrates the attention mechanism into the interior of GRU by adding an attention gate. The attention gate can enhance GRU's ability to remember long-term memory and help memory cells quickly discard unimportant content. RAU is capable of extracting information from the sequential data by adaptively selecting a sequence of regions or locations and pay more attention to the selected regions during learning. Extensive experiments on image classification, sentiment classification and language modeling show that RAU consistently outperforms GRU and other baseline methods.
We propose a method named Super Characters for sentiment classification. This method converts the sentiment classification problem into image classification problem by projecting texts into images and then applying CNN models for classification. Text features are extracted automatically from the generated Super Characters images, hence there is no need of any explicit step of embedding the words or characters into numerical vector representations. Experimental results on large social media corpus show that the Super Characters method consistently outperforms other methods for sentiment classification and topic classification tasks on ten large social media datasets of millions of contents in four different languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English.
We propose a method of stacking multiple long short-term memory (LSTM) layers for modeling sentences. In contrast to the conventional stacked LSTMs where only hidden states are fed as input to the next layer, the suggested architecture accepts both hidden and memory cell states of the preceding layer and fuses information from the left and the lower context using the soft gating mechanism of LSTMs. Thus the architecture modulates the amount of information to be delivered not only in horizontal recurrence but also in vertical connections, from which useful features extracted from lower layers are effectively conveyed to upper layers. We dub this architecture Cell-aware Stacked LSTM (CAS-LSTM) and show from experiments that our models bring significant performance gain over the standard LSTMs on benchmark datasets for natural language inference, paraphrase detection, sentiment classification, and machine translation. We also conduct extensive qualitative analysis to understand the internal behavior of the suggested approach.
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.
Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an iterative recursive attention model, which constructs incremental representations of input data through reusing results of previously computed queries. We train our model on sentiment classification datasets and demonstrate its capacity to identify and combine different aspects of the input in an easily interpretable manner, while obtaining performance close to the state of the art.