An obstacle to the development of many natural language processing products is the vast amount of training examples necessary to get satisfactory results. The generation of these examples is often a tedious and time-consuming task. This paper this paper proposes a method to transform the sentiment of sentences in order to limit the work necessary to generate more training data. This means that one sentence can be transformed to an opposite sentiment sentence and should reduce by half the work required in the generation of text. The proposed pipeline consists of a sentiment classifier with an attention mechanism to highlight the short phrases that determine the sentiment of a sentence. Then, these phrases are changed to phrases of the opposite sentiment using a baseline model and an autoencoder approach. Experiments are run on both the separate parts of the pipeline as well as on the end-to-end model. The sentiment classifier is tested on its accuracy and is found to perform adequately. The autoencoder is tested on how well it is able to change the sentiment of an encoded phrase and it was found that such a task is possible. We use human evaluation to judge the performance of the full (end-to-end) pipeline and that reveals that a model using word vectors outperforms the encoder model. Numerical evaluation shows that a success rate of 54.7 is achieved on the sentiment change.
Transforming the sentiment of sentences has not been systematically attempted, however there are some previous pieces of research into this particular topic. @cite_21 propose a method where a sentence or phrase with the target attribute, in this case sentiment, is extracted and either inserted in the new sentence or completely replacing the previous sentence. Their approach finds phrases based on how often they appear in text with a certain attribute and not in text with the other attribute. However, this approach can not take phrases into account that by themselves are not necessarily strongly leaning towards one sentiment, but still essential to the sentiment of the sentence.
@cite_21
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We consider the task of text attribute transfer: transforming a sentence to alter a specific attribute (e.g., sentiment) while preserving its attribute-independent content (e.g., changing "screen is just the right size" to "screen is too small"). Our training data includes only sentences labeled with their attribute (e.g., positive or negative), but not pairs of sentences that differ only in their attributes, so we must learn to disentangle attributes from attribute-independent content in an unsupervised way. Previous work using adversarial methods has struggled to produce high-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose simpler methods motivated by the observation that text attributes are often marked by distinctive phrases (e.g., "too small"). Our strongest method extracts content words by deleting phrases associated with the sentence's original attribute value, retrieves new phrases associated with the target attribute, and uses a neural model to fluently combine these into a final output. On human evaluation, our best method generates grammatical and appropriate responses on 22 more inputs than the best previous system, averaged over three attribute transfer datasets: altering sentiment of reviews on Yelp, altering sentiment of reviews on Amazon, and altering image captions to be more romantic or humorous. This paper presents a parse-and-paraphrase paradigm to assess the degrees of sentiment for product reviews. Sentiment identification has been well studied; however, most previous work provides binary polarities only (positive and negative), and the polarity of sentiment is simply reversed when a negation is detected. The extraction of lexical features such as unigram bigram also complicates the sentiment classification task, as linguistic structure such as implicit long-distance dependency is often disregarded. In this paper, we propose an approach to extracting adverb-adjective-noun phrases based on clause structure obtained by parsing sentences into a hierarchical representation. We also propose a robust general solution for modeling the contribution of adverbials and negation to the score for degree of sentiment. In an application involving extracting aspect-based pros and cons from restaurant reviews, we obtained a 45 relative improvement in recall through the use of parsing methods, while also improving precision. Deriving prior polarity lexica for sentiment analysis – where positive or negative scores are associated with words out of context – is a challenging task. Usually, a trade-off between precision and coverage is hard to find, and it depends on the methodology used to build the lexicon. Manually annotated lexica provide a high precision but lack in coverage, whereas automatic derivation from pre-existing knowledge guarantees high coverage at the cost of a lower precision. Since the automatic derivation of prior polarities is less time consuming than manual annotation, there has been a great bloom of these approaches, in particular based on the SentiWordNet resource. In this paper, we compare the most frequently used techniques based on SentiWordNet with newer ones and blend them in a learning framework (a so called ‘ensemble method’). By taking advantage of manually built prior polarity lexica, our ensemble method is better able to predict the prior value of unseen words and to outperform all the other SentiWordNet approaches. Using this technique we have built SentiWords , a prior polarity lexicon of approximately 155,000 words, that has both a high precision and a high coverage. We finally show that in sentiment analysis tasks, using our lexicon allows us to outperform both the single metrics derived from SentiWordNet and popular manually annotated sentiment lexica. Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, is a form of information extraction from text of growing research and commercial interest. In this paper we present our machine learning experiments with regard to sentiment analysis in blog, review and forum texts found on the World Wide Web and written in English, Dutch and French. We train from a set of example sentences or statements that are manually annotated as positive, negative or neutral with regard to a certain entity. We are interested in the feelings that people express with regard to certain consumption products. We learn and evaluate several classification models that can be configured in a cascaded pipeline. We have to deal with several problems, being the noisy character of the input texts, the attribution of the sentiment to a particular entity and the small size of the training set. We succeed to identify positive, negative and neutral feelings to the entity under consideration with ca. 83 accuracy for English texts based on unigram features augmented with linguistic features. The accuracy results of processing the Dutch and French texts are ca. 70 and 68 respectively due to the larger variety of the linguistic expressions that more often diverge from standard language, thus demanding more training patterns. In addition, our experiments give us insights into the portability of the learned models across domains and languages. A substantial part of the article investigates the role of active learning techniques for reducing the number of examples to be manually annotated.