What language pairs are considered?
English-French, English-Italian, English-Spanish, English-German.
Creating sentiment polarity lexicons is labor intensive. Automatically translating them from resourceful languages requires in-domain machine translation systems, which rely on large quantities of bi-texts. In this paper, we propose to replace machine translation by transferring words from the lexicon through word embeddings aligned across languages with a simple linear transform. The approach leads to no degradation, compared to machine translation, when tested on sentiment polarity classification on tweets from four languages.
Sentiment analysis is a task that aims at recognizing in text the opinion of the writer. It is often modeled as a classification problem which relies on features extracted from the text in order to feed a classifier. Relevant features proposed in the literature span from microblogging artifacts including hashtags, emoticons BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , intensifiers like all-caps words and character repetitions BIBREF2 , sentiment-topic features BIBREF3 , to the inclusion of polarity lexicons. The objective of the work presented in this paper is the creation of sentiment polarity lexicons. They are word lists or phrase lists with positive and negative sentiment labels. Sentiment lexicons allow to increase the feature space with more relevant and generalizing characteristics of the input. Unfortunately, creating sentiment lexicons requires human expertise, is time consuming, and often results in limited coverage when dealing with new domains. In the literature, it has been proposed to extend existing lexicons without supervision BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , or to automatically translate existing lexicons from resourceful languages with statistical machine translation (SMT) systems BIBREF6 . While the former requires seed lexicons, the later are very interesting because they can automate the process of generating sentiment lexicons without any human expertise. But automatically translating sentiment lexicons leads to two problems: (1) out-of-vocabulary words, such as mis-spellings, morphological variants and slang, cannot be translated, and (2) machine translation performance strongly depends on available training resources such as bi-texts. In this paper, we propose to apply the method proposed in BIBREF7 for automatically mapping word embeddings across languages and use them to translate sentiment lexicons only given a small, general bilingual dictionary. After creating monolingual word embeddings in the source and target language, we train a linear transform on the bilingual dictionary and apply that transform to words for which we don't have a translation. We perform experiments on 3-class polarity classification in tweets, and report results on four different languages: French, Italian, Spanish and German. Existing English sentiment lexicons are translated to the target languages through the proposed approach, given gs trained on the respective Wikipedia of each language. Then, a SVM-based classifier is fed with lexicon features, comparing machine translation with embedding transfer. After presenting related work in Section SECREF2 , the extraction of word gs and their mapping across languages are detailed in Section SECREF3 . The corpus on which experiments are carried out and the results of our experiments are presented in Section SECREF4 . Finally, we conclude with a discussion of possible directions in Section SECREF5 .