In this paper, we present Singlish sentiment lexicon, a concept-level knowledge base for sentiment analysis that associates multiword expressions to a set of emotion labels and a polarity value. Unlike many other sentiment analysis resources, this lexicon is not built by manually labeling pieces of knowledge coming from general NLP resources such as WordNet or DBPedia. Instead, it is automatically constructed by applying graph-mining and multi-dimensional scaling techniques on the affective common-sense knowledge collected from three different sources. This knowledge is represented redundantly at three levels: semantic network, matrix, and vector space. Subsequently, the concepts are labeled by emotions and polarity through the ensemble application of spreading activation, neural networks and an emotion categorization model.
Because of license restrictions, it often becomes impossible to strictly reproduce most research results on Twitter data already a few months after the creation of the corpus. This situation worsened gradually as time passes and tweets become inaccessible. This is a critical issue for reproducible and accountable research on social media. We partly solve this challenge by annotating a new Twitter-like corpus from an alternative large social medium with licenses that are compatible with reproducible experiments: Mastodon. We manually annotate both dialogues and sentiments on this corpus, and train a multi-task hierarchical recurrent network on joint sentiment and dialog act recognition. We experimentally demonstrate that transfer learning may be efficiently achieved between both tasks, and further analyze some specific correlations between sentiments and dialogues on social media. Both the annotated corpus and deep network are released with an open-source license.
We propose a novel multi-task pre-training method for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). We pre-train SER model simultaneously on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and sentiment classification tasks to make the acoustic ASR model more ``emotion aware''. We generate targets for the sentiment classification using text-to-sentiment model trained on publicly available data. Finally, we fine-tune the acoustic ASR on emotion annotated speech data. We evaluated the proposed approach on the MSP-Podcast dataset, where we achieved the best reported concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.41 for valence prediction.
Code-switching is a phenomenon in which two or more languages are used in the same message. Nowadays, it is quite common to find messages with languages mixed in social media. This phenomenon presents a challenge for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we use a standard convolutional neural network model to predict the sentiment of tweets in a blend of Spanish and English languages. Our simple approach achieved a F1-score of 0.71 on test set on the competition. We analyze our best model capabilities and perform error analysis to expose important difficulties for classifying sentiment in a code-switching setting.
Code-mixing is the practice of alternating between two or more languages. Mostly observed in multilingual societies, its occurrence is increasing and therefore its importance. A major part of sentiment analysis research has been monolingual, and most of them perform poorly on code-mixed text. In this work, we introduce methods that use different kinds of multilingual and cross-lingual embeddings to efficiently transfer knowledge from monolingual text to code-mixed text for sentiment analysis of code-mixed text. Our methods can handle code-mixed text through a zero-shot learning. Our methods beat state-of-the-art on English-Spanish code-mixed sentiment analysis by absolute 3\% F1-score. We are able to achieve 0.58 F1-score (without parallel corpus) and 0.62 F1-score (with parallel corpus) on the same benchmark in a zero-shot way as compared to 0.68 F1-score in supervised settings. Our code is publicly available.
The rise of social media is enabling people to freely express their opinions about products and services. The aim of sentiment analysis is to automatically determine subject's sentiment (e.g., positive, negative, or neutral) towards a particular aspect such as topic, product, movie, news etc. Deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful machine learning technique to tackle a growing demand of accurate sentiment analysis. However, limited work has been conducted to apply deep learning algorithms to languages other than English, such as Persian. In this work, two deep learning models (deep autoencoders and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)) are developed and applied to a novel Persian movie reviews dataset. The proposed deep learning models are analyzed and compared with the state-of-the-art shallow multilayer perceptron (MLP) based machine learning model. Simulation results demonstrate the enhanced performance of deep learning over state-of-the-art MLP.
In this paper, we introduce EmpBot: an end-to-end empathetic chatbot. Empathetic conversational agents should not only understand what is being discussed, but also acknowledge the implied feelings of the conversation partner and respond appropriately. To this end, we propose a method based on a transformer pretrained language model (T5). Specifically, during finetuning we propose to use three objectives: response language modeling, sentiment understanding, and empathy forcing. The first objective is crucial for generating relevant and coherent responses, while the next ones are significant for acknowledging the sentimental state of the conversational partner and for favoring empathetic responses. We evaluate our model on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset using both automated metrics and human evaluation. The inclusion of the sentiment understanding and empathy forcing auxiliary losses favor empathetic responses, as human evaluation results indicate, comparing with the current state-of-the-art.
This paper presents how techniques from natural language processing can be used to examine the sentiment trajectories of gang-related drill music in the United Kingdom (UK). This work is important because key public figures are loosely making controversial linkages between drill music and recent escalations in youth violence in London. Thus, this paper examines the dynamic use of sentiment in gang-related drill music lyrics. The findings suggest two distinct sentiment use patterns and statistical analyses revealed that lyrics with a markedly positive tone attract more views and engagement on YouTube than negative ones. Our work provides the first empirical insights into the language use of London drill music, and it can, therefore, be used in future studies and by policymakers to help understand the alleged drill-gang nexus.
Sentiment Analysis is one of the most classical and primarily studied natural language processing tasks. This problem had a notable advance with the proposition of more complex and scalable machine learning models. Despite this progress, the Brazilian Portuguese language still disposes only of limited linguistic resources, such as datasets dedicated to sentiment classification, especially when considering the existence of predefined partitions in training, testing, and validation sets that would allow a more fair comparison of different algorithm alternatives. Motivated by these issues, this work analyzes the predictive performance of a range of document embedding strategies, assuming the polarity as the system outcome. This analysis includes five sentiment analysis datasets in Brazilian Portuguese, unified in a single dataset, and a reference partitioning in training, testing, and validation sets, both made publicly available through a digital repository. A cross-evaluation of dataset-specific models over different contexts is conducted to evaluate their generalization capabilities and the feasibility of adopting a unique model for addressing all scenarios.
Cross-domain sentiment classification has drawn much attention in recent years. Most existing approaches focus on learning domain-invariant representations in both the source and target domains, while few of them pay attention to the domain-specific information. Despite the non-transferability of the domain-specific information, simultaneously learning domain-dependent representations can facilitate the learning of domain-invariant representations. In this paper, we focus on aspect-level cross-domain sentiment classification, and propose to distill the domain-invariant sentiment features with the help of an orthogonal domain-dependent task, i.e. aspect detection, which is built on the aspects varying widely in different domains. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
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