Leveraging large amounts of weakly supervised data for multi-language sentiment classification


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Date

2017

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Data

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for multi-lingual sentiment classification in short texts. This is a challenging task as the amount of training data in languages other than English is very limited. Previously proposed multi-lingual approaches typically require to establish a correspondence to English for which powerful classifiers are already available. In contrast, our method does not require such supervision. We leverage large amounts of weakly- supervised data in various languages to train a multi-layer convolutional network and demonstrate the importance of using pre-training of such networks. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on various multi-lingual datasets, including the recent SemEval-2016 sentiment prediction benchmark (Task 4), where we achieved state-of-the-art performance. We also compare the performance of our model trained individually for each language to a variant trained for all languages at once. We show that the latter model reaches slightly worse - but still acceptable - performance when compared to the single language model, while benefiting from better generalization properties across languages.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW' 17)

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

1045 - 1052

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2017)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Sentiment classification; multi-language; weak supervision; neural networks

Organisational unit

09462 - Hofmann, Thomas / Hofmann, Thomas check_circle

Notes

Funding

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