On Deep Learning in Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification

Cross-domain sentiment classification consists in distinguishing positive and negative reviews of a target domain by using knowledge extracted and transferred from a heterogeneous source domain. Cross-domain solutions aim at overcoming the costly pre-classification of each new training set by human experts. Despite the potential business relevance of this research thread, the existing ad hoc solutions are still not scalable with real large text sets. Scalable Deep Learning techniques have been effectively applied to in-domain text classification, by training and categorising documents belonging to the same domain. This work analyses the cross-domain efficacy of a well-known unsupervised Deep Learning approach for text mining, called Paragraph Vector, comparing its performance with a method based on Markov Chain developed ad hoc for cross-domain sentiment classification. The experiments show that, once enough data is available for training, Paragraph Vector achieves accuracy equiva lent to Markov Chain both in-domain and cross-domain, despite no explicit transfer learning capability. The outcome suggests that combining Deep Learning with transfer learning techniques could be a breakthrough of ad hoc cross-domain sentiment solutions in big data scenarios. This opinion is confirmed by a really simple multi-source experiment we tried to improve transfer learning, which increases the accuracy of cross-domain sentiment classification

Combination of Domain Knowledge and Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis of Short and Informal Messages on Social Media

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 using deep learning approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to handle this problem. This work is extended from our previous work, in which we proposed to combine the typical deep learning technique of Convolutional Neural Networks with domain knowledge. The combination is used for acquiring additional training data augmentation and a more reasonable loss function. In this work, we further improve our architecture by various substantial enhancements, including negation-based data augmentation, transfer learning for word embeddings, the combination of word-level embeddings and character-level embeddings, and using multitask learning technique for attaching domain knowledge rules in the learning process. Those enhancements, specifically aiming to handle short and informal messages, help us to enjoy significant improvement in performance once experimenting on real datasets.Comment: A Preprint of an article accepted for publication by Inderscience in IJCVR on September 201