A Multi-modal Approach to Fine-grained Opinion Mining on Video Reviews

Despite the recent advances in opinion mining for written reviews, few works have tackled the problem on other sources of reviews. In light of this issue, we propose a multi-modal approach for mining fine-grained opinions from video reviews that is able to determine the aspects of the item under review that are being discussed and the sentiment orientation towards them. Our approach works at the sentence level without the need for time annotations and uses features derived from the audio, video and language transcriptions of its contents. We evaluate our approach on two datasets and show that leveraging the video and audio modalities consistently provides increased performance over text-only baselines, providing evidence these extra modalities are key in better understanding video reviews.Comment: Second Grand Challenge and Workshop on Multimodal Language ACL 202

Numeral Understanding in Financial Tweets for Fine-grained Crowd-based Forecasting

Numerals that contain much information in financial documents are crucial for financial decision making. They play different roles in financial analysis processes. This paper is aimed at understanding the meanings of numerals in financial tweets for fine-grained crowd-based forecasting. We propose a taxonomy that classifies the numerals in financial tweets into 7 categories, and further extend some of these categories into several subcategories. Neural network-based models with word and character-level encoders are proposed for 7-way classification and 17-way classification. We perform backtest to confirm the effectiveness of the numeric opinions made by the crowd. This work is the first attempt to understand numerals in financial social media data, and we provide the first comparison of fine-grained opinion of individual investors and analysts based on their forecast price. The numeral corpus used in our experiments, called FinNum 1.0 , is available for research purposes.Comment: Accepted by the 2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2018), Santiago, Chil

Deep Memory Networks for Attitude Identification

We consider the task of identifying attitudes towards a given set of entities from text. Conventionally, this task is decomposed into two separate subtasks: target detection that identifies whether each entity is mentioned in the text, either explicitly or implicitly, and polarity classification that classifies the exact sentiment towards an identified entity (the target) into positive, negative, or neutral. Instead, we show that attitude identification can be solved with an end-to-end machine learning architecture, in which the two subtasks are interleaved by a deep memory network. In this way, signals produced in target detection provide clues for polarity classification, and reversely, the predicted polarity provides feedback to the identification of targets. Moreover, the treatments for the set of targets also influence each other -- the learned representations may share the same semantics for some targets but vary for others. The proposed deep memory network, the AttNet, outperforms methods that do not consider the interactions between the subtasks or those among the targets, including conventional machine learning methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning models.Comment: Accepted to WSDM'1

Structural Attention Neural Networks for improved sentiment analysis

We introduce a tree-structured attention neural network for sentences and small phrases and apply it to the problem of sentiment classification. Our model expands the current recursive models by incorporating structural information around a node of a syntactic tree using both bottom-up and top-down information propagation. Also, the model utilizes structural attention to identify the most salient representations during the construction of the syntactic tree. To our knowledge, the proposed models achieve state of the art performance on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank dataset.Comment: Submitted to EACL2017 for revie

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using a Two-Step Neural Network Architecture

The World Wide Web holds a wealth of information in the form of unstructured texts such as customer reviews for products, events and more. By extracting and analyzing the expressed opinions in customer reviews in a fine-grained way, valuable opportunities and insights for customers and businesses can be gained. We propose a neural network based system to address the task of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis to compete in Task 2 of the ESWC-2016 Challenge on Semantic Sentiment Analysis. Our proposed architecture divides the task in two subtasks: aspect term extraction and aspect-specific sentiment extraction. This approach is flexible in that it allows to address each subtask independently. As a first step, a recurrent neural network is used to extract aspects from a text by framing the problem as a sequence labeling task. In a second step, a recurrent network processes each extracted aspect with respect to its context and predicts a sentiment label. The system uses pretrained semantic word embedding features which we experimentally enhance with semantic knowledge extracted from WordNet. Further features extracted from SenticNet prove to be beneficial for the extraction of sentiment labels. As the best performing system in its category, our proposed system proves to be an effective approach for the Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis