Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language understanding. It requires fine-grained semantical reasoning about a target entity appeared in the text. As manual annotation over the aspects is laborious and time-consuming, the amount of labeled data is limited for supervised learning. This paper proposes a semi-supervised method for the ATSA problem by using the Variational Autoencoder based on Transformer (VAET), which models the latent distribution via variational inference. By disentangling the latent representation into the aspect-specific sentiment and the lexical context, our method induces the underlying sentiment prediction for the unlabeled data, which then benefits the ATSA classifier. Our method is classifier agnostic, i.e., the classifier is an independent module and various advanced supervised models can be integrated. Experimental results are obtained on the SemEval 2014 task 4 and show that our method is effective with four classical classifiers. The proposed method outperforms two general semisupervised methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Another related topic is semi-supervised learning for the text classification. A simple but efficient method is to use pre-trained modules, e.g., initializing the word embedding or bottom layers with pre-trained parameters. Although word embedding technique has been wildly used in NLP models, e.g., Glove @cite_9 and ELMo @cite_7 , other pretraining-based method is model-dependent. The ELMo @cite_7 replaces the embedding layer with the pre-trained BILSTM to capture the contextual representation. This method is complementary with the proposed method. The combination with our method may yield better performance than either of them alone, but that investigation is beyond the scope of this paper. However, other methods, e.g., the Transformer LM @cite_16 , proposed a unified semi-supervised framework to handle various tasks. This constraint prevents advanced supervised models from the semi-supervised learning.
@cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_7
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Neural network-based representations ("embeddings") have dramatically advanced natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including clinical NLP tasks such as concept extraction. Recently, however, more advanced embedding methods and representations (e.g., ELMo, BERT) have further pushed the state-of-the-art in NLP, yet there are no common best practices for how to integrate these representations into clinical tasks. The purpose of this study, then, is to explore the space of possible options in utilizing these new models for clinical concept extraction, including comparing these to traditional word embedding methods (word2vec, GloVe, fastText). Both off-the-shelf, open-domain embeddings and pre-training clinical embeddings from MIMIC-III are evaluated. We explore a battery of embedding methods consisting of traditional word embeddings and contextual embeddings, and compare these on four concept extraction corpora: i2b2 2010, i2b2 2012, SemEval 2014, and SemEval 2015. We also analyze the impact of the pre-training time of a large language model like ELMo or BERT on the extraction performance. Finally, we present an intuitive way to understand the semantic information encoded by contextual embeddings. Contextual embeddings pre-trained on a large clinical corpus achieves new state-of-the-art performances across all concept extraction tasks. The best-performing model outperforms all state-of-the-art methods with respective F1-measures of 90.25, 93.18 (partial), 80.74, and 81.65. We demonstrate the potential of contextual embeddings through the state-of-the-art performance these methods achieve on clinical concept extraction. Additionally, we demonstrate contextual embeddings encode valuable This paper presents a new semi-supervised framework with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for text categorization. Unlike the previous approaches that rely on word embeddings, our method learns embeddings of small text regions from unlabeled data for integration into a supervised CNN. The proposed scheme for embedding learning is based on the idea of two-view semi-supervised learning, which is intended to be useful for the task of interest even though the training is done on unlabeled data. Our models achieve better results than previous approaches on sentiment classification and topic classification tasks. Adversarial training provides a means of regularizing supervised learning algorithms while virtual adversarial training is able to extend supervised learning algorithms to the semi-supervised setting. However, both methods require making small perturbations to numerous entries of the input vector, which is inappropriate for sparse high-dimensional inputs such as one-hot word representations. We extend adversarial and virtual adversarial training to the text domain by applying perturbations to the word embeddings in a recurrent neural network rather than to the original input itself. The proposed method achieves state of the art results on multiple benchmark semi-supervised and purely supervised tasks. We provide visualizations and analysis showing that the learned word embeddings have improved in quality and that while training, the model is less prone to overfitting.