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

Contextualized Non-local Neural Networks for Sequence Learning

Recently, a large number of neural mechanisms and models have been proposed for sequence learning, of which self-attention, as exemplified by the Transformer model, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines and draws on the complementary strengths of these two methods. Specifically, we propose contextualized non-local neural networks (CN$^{\textbf{3}}$), which can both dynamically construct a task-specific structure of a sentence and leverage rich local dependencies within a particular neighborhood. Experimental results on ten NLP tasks in text classification, semantic matching, and sequence labeling show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines and discovers task-specific dependency structures, thus providing better interpretability to users.Comment: Accepted by AAAI201

Attentive Convolution: Equipping CNNs with RNN-style Attention Mechanisms

In NLP, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have benefited less than recurrent neural networks (RNNs) from attention mechanisms. We hypothesize that this is because the attention in CNNs has been mainly implemented as attentive pooling (i.e., it is applied to pooling) rather than as attentive convolution (i.e., it is integrated into convolution). Convolution is the differentiator of CNNs in that it can powerfully model the higher-level representation of a word by taking into account its local fixed-size context in the input text t^x. In this work, we propose an attentive convolution network, ATTCONV. It extends the context scope of the convolution operation, deriving higher-level features for a word not only from local context, but also information extracted from nonlocal context by the attention mechanism commonly used in RNNs. This nonlocal context can come (i) from parts of the input text t^x that are distant or (ii) from extra (i.e., external) contexts t^y. Experiments on sentence modeling with zero-context (sentiment analysis), single-context (textual entailment) and multiple-context (claim verification) demonstrate the effectiveness of ATTCONV in sentence representation learning with the incorporation of context. In particular, attentive convolution outperforms attentive pooling and is a strong competitor to popular attentive RNNs.Comment: Camera-ready for TACL. 16 page