The ability to obtain accurate food security metrics in developing areas where relevant data can be sparse is critically important for policy makers tasked with implementing food aid programs. As a result, a great deal of work has been dedicated to predicting important food security metrics such as annual crop yields using a variety of methods including simulation, remote sensing, weather models, and human expert input. As a complement to existing techniques in crop yield prediction, this work develops neural network models for predicting the sentiment of Twitter feeds from farming communities. Specifically, we investigate the potential of both direct learning on a small dataset of agriculturally-relevant tweets and transfer learning from larger, well-labeled sentiment datasets from other domains (e.g. politics) to accurately predict agricultural sentiment, which we hope would ultimately serve as a useful crop yield predictor. We find that direct learning from small, relevant datasets outperforms transfer learning from large, fully-labeled datasets, that convolutional neural networks broadly outperform recurrent neural networks on Twitter sentiment classification, and that these models perform substantially less well on ternary sentiment problems characteristic of practical settings than on binary problems often found in the literature.
---Previous work by @cite_4 demonstrates that transfer learning can be effective, even for a simple SVM classifier. We hypothesize that by consistently using GloVe word embeddings that capture the semantic similarities among words, we could enable effective cross-domain transfer learning on sentiment prediction tasks.
@cite_4
2160039895
Cross-domain learning methods have shown promising results by leveraging labeled patterns from auxiliary domains to learn a robust classifier for target domain, which has a limited number of labeled samples. To cope with the tremendous change of feature distribution between different domains in video concept detection, we propose a new cross-domain kernel learning method. Our method, referred to as Domain Transfer SVM (DTSVM), simultaneously learns a kernel function and a robust SVM classifier by minimizing both the structural risk functional of SVM and the distribution mismatch of labeled and unlabeled samples between the auxiliary and target domains. Comprehensive experiments on the challenging TRECVID corpus demonstrate that DTSVM outperforms existing cross-domain learning and multiple kernel learning methods.