A Case Study and Qualitative Analysis of Simple Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining

User-generated content from social media is produced in many languages, making it technically challenging to compare the discussed themes from one domain across different cultures and regions. It is relevant for domains in a globalized world, such as market research, where people from two nations and markets might have different requirements for a product. We propose a simple, modern, and effective method for building a single topic model with sentiment analysis capable of covering multiple languages simultanteously, based on a pre-trained state-of-the-art deep neural network for natural language understanding. To demonstrate its feasibility, we apply the model to newspaper articles and user comments of a specific domain, i.e., organic food products and related consumption behavior. The themes match across languages. Additionally, we obtain an high proportion of stable and domain-relevant topics, a meaningful relation between topics and their respective textual contents, and an interpretable representation for social media documents. Marketing can potentially benefit from our method, since it provides an easy-to-use means of addressing specific customer interests from different market regions around the globe. For reproducibility, we provide the code, data, and results of our study.

End-to-End Annotator Bias Approximation on Crowdsourced Single-Label Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is often a crowdsourcing task prone to subjective labels given by many annotators. It is not yet fully understood how the annotation bias of each annotator can be modeled correctly with state-of-the-art methods. However, resolving annotator bias precisely and reliably is the key to understand annotators' labeling behavior and to successfully resolve corresponding individual misconceptions and wrongdoings regarding the annotation task. Our contribution is an explanation and improvement for precise neural end-to-end bias modeling and ground truth estimation, which reduces an undesired mismatch in that regard of the existing state-of-the-art. Classification experiments show that it has potential to improve accuracy in cases where each sample is annotated only by one single annotator. We provide the whole source code publicly and release an own domain-specific sentiment dataset containing 10,000 sentences discussing organic food products. These are crawled from social media and are singly labeled by 10 non-expert annotators.

SocialVisTUM: An Interactive Visualization Toolkit for Correlated Neural Topic Models on Social Media Opinion Mining

Recent research in opinion mining proposed word embedding-based topic modeling methods that provide superior coherence compared to traditional topic modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate how these methods can be used to display correlated topic models on social media texts using SocialVisTUM, our proposed interactive visualization toolkit. It displays a graph with topics as nodes and their correlations as edges. Further details are displayed interactively to support the exploration of large text collections, e.g., representative words and sentences of topics, topic and sentiment distributions, hierarchical topic clustering, and customizable, predefined topic labels. The toolkit optimizes automatically on custom data for optimal coherence. We show a working instance of the toolkit on data crawled from English social media discussions about organic food consumption. The visualization confirms findings of a qualitative consumer research study. SocialVisTUM and its training procedures are accessible online.

Classification of Consumer Belief Statements From Social Media

Social media offer plenty of information to perform market research in order to meet the requirements of customers. One way how this research is conducted is that a domain expert gathers and categorizes user-generated content into a complex and fine-grained class structure. In many of such cases, little data meets complex annotations. It is not yet fully understood how this can be leveraged successfully for classification. We examine the classification accuracy of expert labels when used with a) many fine-grained classes and b) few abstract classes. For scenario b) we compare abstract class labels given by the domain expert as baseline and by automatic hierarchical clustering. We compare this to another baseline where the entire class structure is given by a completely unsupervised clustering approach. By doing so, this work can serve as an example of how complex expert annotations are potentially beneficial and can be utilized in the most optimal way for opinion mining in highly specific domains. By exploring across a range of techniques and experiments, we find that automated class abstraction approaches in particular the unsupervised approach performs remarkably well against domain expert baseline on text classification tasks. This has the potential to inspire opinion mining applications in order to support market researchers in practice and to inspire fine-grained automated content analysis on a large scale.