Sentiment analysis, especially for long documents, plausibly requires methods capturing complex linguistics structures. To accommodate this, we propose a novel framework to exploit task-related discourse for the task of sentiment analysis. More specifically, we are combining the large-scale, sentiment-dependent MEGA-DT treebank with a novel neural architecture for sentiment prediction, based on a hybrid TreeLSTM hierarchical attention model. Experiments show that our framework using sentiment-related discourse augmentations for sentiment prediction enhances the overall performance for long documents, even beyond previous approaches using well-established discourse parsers trained on human annotated data. We show that a simple ensemble approach can further enhance performance by selectively using discourse, depending on the document length.
Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we created a gold standard Tamil-English code-switched, sentiment-annotated corpus containing 15,744 comment posts from YouTube. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpus and assigning polarities. We present inter-annotator agreement and show the results of sentiment analysis trained on this corpus as a benchmark.
Social media hold valuable, vast and unstructured information on public opinion that can be utilized to improve products and services. The automatic analysis of such data, however, requires a deep understanding of natural language. Current sentiment analysis approaches are mainly based on word co-occurrence frequencies, which are inadequate in most practical cases. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid framework for concept-level sentiment analysis in Persian language, that integrates linguistic rules and deep learning to optimize polarity detection. When a pattern is triggered, the framework allows sentiments to flow from words to concepts based on symbolic dependency relations. When no pattern is triggered, the framework switches to its subsymbolic counterpart and leverages deep neural networks (DNN) to perform the classification. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches (including support vector machine, and logistic regression) and DNN classifiers (long short-term memory, and Convolutional Neural Networks) with a margin of 10-15% and 3-4% respectively, using benchmark Persian product and hotel reviews corpora.
The main approaches to sentiment analysis are rule-based methods and ma-chine learning, in particular, deep neural network models with the Trans-former architecture, including BERT. The performance of neural network models in the tasks of sentiment analysis is superior to the performance of rule-based methods. The reasons for this situation remain unclear due to the poor interpretability of deep neural network models. One of the main keys to understanding the fundamental differences between the two approaches is the analysis of how sentiment lexicon is taken into account in neural network models. To this end, we study the attention weights matrices of the Russian-language RuBERT model. We fine-tune RuBERT on sentiment text corpora and compare the distributions of attention weights for sentiment and neutral lexicons. It turns out that, on average, 3/4 of the heads of various model var-iants statistically pay more attention to the sentiment lexicon compared to the neutral one.
Code-mixing is a phenomenon which arises mainly in multilingual societies. Multilingual people, who are well versed in their native languages and also English speakers, tend to code-mix using English-based phonetic typing and the insertion of anglicisms in their main language. This linguistic phenomenon poses a great challenge to conventional NLP domains such as Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation, and Text Summarization, to name a few. In this work, we focus on working out a plausible solution to the domain of Code-Mixed Sentiment Analysis. This work was done as participation in the SemEval-2020 Sentimix Task, where we focused on the sentiment analysis of English-Hindi code-mixed sentences. our username for the submission was "sainik.mahata" and team name was "JUNLP". We used feature extraction algorithms in conjunction with traditional machine learning algorithms such as SVR and Grid Search in an attempt to solve the task. Our approach garnered an f1-score of 66.2\% when tested using metrics prepared by the organizers of the task.
The Coronavirus pandemic has affected the normal course of life. People around the world have taken to social media to express their opinions and general emotions regarding this phenomenon that has taken over the world by storm. The social networking site, Twitter showed an unprecedented increase in tweets related to the novel Coronavirus in a very short span of time. This paper presents the global sentiment analysis of tweets related to Coronavirus and how the sentiment of people in different countries has changed over time. Furthermore, to determine the impact of Coronavirus on daily aspects of life, tweets related to Work From Home (WFH) and Online Learning were scraped and the change in sentiment over time was observed. In addition, various Machine Learning models such as Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were implemented for sentiment classification and their accuracies were determined. Exploratory data analysis was also performed for a dataset providing information about the number of confirmed cases on a per-day basis in a few of the worst-hit countries to provide a comparison between the change in sentiment with the change in cases since the start of this pandemic till June 2020.
Increasing attention has been drawn to the sentiment analysis of financial documents. The most popular examples of such documents include analyst reports and economic news, the analysis of which is frequently used to capture the trends in market sentiments. On the other hand, the significance of the role sentiment analysis plays in the financial domain has given rise to the efforts to construct a financial domain-specific sentiment lexicon. Sentiment lexicons lend a hand for solving various text mining tasks, such as unsupervised classification of text data, while alleviating the arduous human labor required for manual labeling. One of the challenges in the construction of an effective sentiment lexicon is that the semantic orientation of a word may change depending on the context in which it appears. For instance, the word ``profit" usually conveys positive sentiments; however, when the word is juxtaposed with another word ``decrease," the sentiment associated with the phrase ``profit decreases" now becomes negative. Hence, the sentiment of a given word may shift as one begins to consider the context surrounding the word. In this paper, we address this issue by incorporating context when building sentiment lexicon from a given corpus. Specifically, we construct a lexicon named Senti-DD for the Sentiment lexicon composed of Direction-Dependent words, which expresses each term a pair of a directional word and a direction-dependent word. Experiment results show that higher classification performance is achieved with Senti-DD, proving the effectiveness of our method for automatically constructing a context-aware sentiment lexicon in the financial domain.
Sentiment analysis is crucial for extracting social signals from social media content. Due to the prevalence of images in social media, image sentiment analysis is receiving increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing systems are black-boxes that do not provide insight on how image content invokes sentiment and emotion in the viewers. Psychological studies have confirmed that salient objects in an image often invoke emotions. In this work, we investigate more fine-grained and more comprehensive interaction between visual saliency and visual sentiment. In particular, we partition images in several primary scene-type dimensions, including: open-closed, natural-manmade, indoor-outdoor, and face-noface. Using state of the art saliency detection algorithm and sentiment classification algorithm, we examine how the sentiment of the salient region(s) in an image relates to the overall sentiment of the image. The experiments on a representative image emotion dataset have shown interesting correlation between saliency and sentiment in different scene types and in turn shed light on the mechanism of visual sentiment evocation.
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. Mining opinions expressed in the user generated content is a challenging yet practically very useful problem. This survey would cover various approaches and methodology used in Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining in general. The focus would be on Internet text like, Product review, tweets and other social media.