Social media is increasingly used by humans to express their feelings and opinions in the form of short text messages. Detecting sentiments in the text has a wide range of applications including identifying anxiety or depression of individuals and measuring well-being or mood of a community. Sentiments can be expressed in many ways that can be seen such as facial expression and gestures, speech and by written text. Sentiment Analysis in text documents is essentially a content-based classification problem involving concepts from the domains of Natural Language Processing as well as Machine Learning. In this paper, sentiment recognition based on textual data and the techniques used in sentiment analysis are discussed.
Sentiment analysis on large-scale social media data is important to bridge the gaps between social media contents and real world activities including political election prediction, individual and public emotional status monitoring and analysis, and so on. Although textual sentiment analysis has been well studied based on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, analysis of the role of extensive emoji uses in sentiment analysis remains light. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Twitter sentiment analysis with extra attention on emojis. We first learn bi-sense emoji embeddings under positive and negative sentimental tweets individually, and then train a sentiment classifier by attending on these bi-sense emoji embeddings with an attention-based long short-term memory network (LSTM). Our experiments show that the bi-sense embedding is effective for extracting sentiment-aware embeddings of emojis and outperforms the state-of-the-art models. We also visualize the attentions to show that the bi-sense emoji embedding provides better guidance on the attention mechanism to obtain a more robust understanding of the semantics and sentiments.
Sentiment analysis of online user generated content is important for many social media analytics tasks. Researchers have largely relied on textual sentiment analysis to develop systems to predict political elections, measure economic indicators, and so on. Recently, social media users are increasingly using images and videos to express their opinions and share their experiences. Sentiment analysis of such large scale visual content can help better extract user sentiments toward events or topics, such as those in image tweets, so that prediction of sentiment from visual content is complementary to textual sentiment analysis. Motivated by the needs in leveraging large scale yet noisy training data to solve the extremely challenging problem of image sentiment analysis, we employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first design a suitable CNN architecture for image sentiment analysis. We obtain half a million training samples by using a baseline sentiment algorithm to label Flickr images. To make use of such noisy machine labeled data, we employ a progressive strategy to fine-tune the deep network. Furthermore, we improve the performance on Twitter images by inducing domain transfer with a small number of manually labeled Twitter images. We have conducted extensive experiments on manually labeled Twitter images. The results show that the proposed CNN can achieve better performance in image sentiment analysis than competing algorithms.
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is the task of extracting triplets of aspect terms, their associated sentiments, and the opinion terms that provide evidence for the expressed sentiments. Previous approaches to ASTE usually simultaneously extract all three components or first identify the aspect and opinion terms, then pair them up to predict their sentiment polarities. In this work, we present a novel paradigm, ASTE-RL, by regarding the aspect and opinion terms as arguments of the expressed sentiment in a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We first focus on sentiments expressed in a sentence, then identify the target aspect and opinion terms for that sentiment. This takes into account the mutual interactions among the triplet's components while improving exploration and sample efficiency. Furthermore, this hierarchical RLsetup enables us to deal with multiple and overlapping triplets. In our experiments, we evaluate our model on existing datasets from laptop and restaurant domains and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. The implementation of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/ASTE-RL.
Sentiment analysis in conversations has gained increasing attention in recent years for the growing amount of applications it can serve, e.g., sentiment analysis, recommender systems, and human-robot interaction. The main difference between conversational sentiment analysis and single sentence sentiment analysis is the existence of context information which may influence the sentiment of an utterance in a dialogue. How to effectively encode contextual information in dialogues, however, remains a challenge. Existing approaches employ complicated deep learning structures to distinguish different parties in a conversation and then model the context information. In this paper, we propose a fast, compact and parameter-efficient party-ignorant framework named bidirectional emotional recurrent unit for conversational sentiment analysis. In our system, a generalized neural tensor block followed by a two-channel classifier is designed to perform context compositionality and sentiment classification, respectively. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state of the art in most cases.
Recent studies in recommender systems have managed to achieve significantly improved performance by leveraging reviews for rating prediction. However, despite being extensively studied, these methods still suffer from some limitations. First, previous studies either encode the document or extract latent sentiment via neural networks, which are difficult to interpret the sentiment of reviewers intuitively. Second, they neglect the personalized interaction of reviews with user/item, i.e., each review has different contributions when modeling the sentiment preference of user/item. To remedy these issues, we propose a Sentiment-aware Interactive Fusion Network (SIFN) for review-based item recommendation. Specifically, we first encode user/item reviews via BERT and propose a light-weighted sentiment learner to extract semantic features of each review. Then, we propose a sentiment prediction task that guides the sentiment learner to extract sentiment-aware features via explicit sentiment labels. Finally, we design a rating prediction task that contains a rating learner with an interactive and fusion module to fuse the identity (i.e., user and item ID) and each review representation so that various interactive features can synergistically influence the final rating score. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to state-of-the-art models.
We examine the relationship between social structure and sentiment through the analysis of a large collection of tweets about the Irish Marriage Referendum of 2015. We obtain the sentiment of every tweet with the hashtags #marref and #marriageref that was posted in the days leading to the referendum, and construct networks to aggregate sentiment and use it to study the interactions among users. Our results show that the sentiment of mention tweets posted by users is correlated with the sentiment of received mentions, and there are significantly more connections between users with similar sentiment scores than among users with opposite scores in the mention and follower networks. We combine the community structure of the two networks with the activity level of the users and sentiment scores to find groups of users who support voting `yes' or `no' in the referendum. There were numerous conversations between users on opposing sides of the debate in the absence of follower connections, which suggests that there were efforts by some users to establish dialogue and debate across ideological divisions. Our analysis shows that social structure can be integrated successfully with sentiment to analyse and understand the disposition of social media users. These results have potential applications in the integration of data and meta-data to study opinion dynamics, public opinion modelling, and polling.
Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) can provide more detailed information than general sentiment analysis, because it aims to predict the sentiment polarities of the given aspects or entities in text. We summarize previous approaches into two subtasks: aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA). Most previous approaches employ long short-term memory and attention mechanisms to predict the sentiment polarity of the concerned targets, which are often complicated and need more training time. We propose a model based on convolutional neural networks and gating mechanisms, which is more accurate and efficient. First, the novel Gated Tanh-ReLU Units can selectively output the sentiment features according to the given aspect or entity. The architecture is much simpler than attention layer used in the existing models. Second, the computations of our model could be easily parallelized during training, because convolutional layers do not have time dependency as in LSTM layers, and gating units also work independently. The experiments on SemEval datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our models.
Social media data in Arabic language is becoming more and more abundant. It is a consensus that valuable information lies in social media data. Mining this data and making the process easier are gaining momentum in the industries. This paper describes an enterprise system we developed for extracting sentiment from large volumes of social data in Arabic dialects. First, we give an overview of the Big Data system for information extraction from multilingual social data from a variety of sources. Then, we focus on the Arabic sentiment analysis capability that was built on top of the system including normalizing written Arabic dialects, building sentiment lexicons, sentiment classification, and performance evaluation. Lastly, we demonstrate the value of enriching sentiment results with user profiles in understanding sentiments of a specific user group.
Sentiment analysis has transitioned from classifying the sentiment of an entire sentence to providing the contextual information of what targets exist in a sentence, what sentiment the individual targets have, and what the causal words responsible for that sentiment are. However, this has led to elaborate requirements being placed on the datasets needed to train neural networks on the joint triplet task of determining an entity, its sentiment, and the causal words for that sentiment. Requiring this kind of data for training systems is problematic, as they suffer from stacking subjective annotations and domain over-fitting leading to poor model generalisation when applied in new contexts. These problems are also likely to be compounded as we attempt to jointly determine additional contextual elements in the future. To mitigate these problems, we present a hybrid neural-symbolic method utilising a Dependency Tree-LSTM's compositional sentiment parse structure and complementary symbolic rules to correctly extract target-sentiment-cause triplets from sentences without the need for triplet training data. We show that this method has the potential to perform in line with state-of-the-art approaches while also simplifying the data required and providing a degree of interpretability through the Tree-LSTM.
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