which non-english language had the best performance?
Russsian
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
With the steady growth in the commercial websites and social media venues, the access to users' reviews have become easier. As the amount of data that can be mined for opinion increased, commercial companies' interests for sentiment analysis increased as well. Sentiment analysis is an important part of understanding user behavior and opinions on products, places, or services. Sentiment analysis has long been studied by the research community, leading to several sentiment-related resources such as sentiment dictionaries that can be used as features for machine learning models BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 . These resources help increase sentiment analysis accuracies; however, they are highly dependent on language and require researchers to build such resources for every language to process. Feature engineering is a large part of the model building phase for most sentiment analysis and emotion detection models BIBREF4 . Determining the correct set of features is a task that requires thorough investigation. Furthermore, these features are mostly language and dataset dependent making it even further challenging to build models for different languages. For example, the sentiment and emotion lexicons, as well as pre-trained word embeddings are not completely transferable to other languages which replicates the efforts for every language that users would like to build sentiment classification models on. For languages and tasks where the data is limited, extracting these features, building language models, training word embeddings, and creating lexicons are big challenges. In addition to the feature engineering effort, the machine learning models' parameters also need to be tuned separately for each language to get the optimal results. In this paper, we take a different approach. We build a reusable sentiment analysis model that does not utilize any lexicons. Our goal is to evaluate how well a generic model can be used to mine opinion in different languages where data is more limited than the language where the generic model is trained on. To that end, we build a training set that contains reviews from different domains in English (e.g., movie reviews, product reviews) and train a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to predict polarity of those reviews. Then focusing on a domain, we make the model specialized in that domain by using the trained weights from the larger data and further training with data on a specific domain. To evaluate the reusability of the sentiment analysis model, we test with non-English datasets. We first translate the test set to English and use the pre-trained model to score polarity in the translated text. In this way, our proposed approach eliminates the need to train language-dependent models, use of sentiment lexicons and word embeddings for each language. Our experiments show that a generalizable sentiment analysis model can be utilized successfully to perform opinion mining for languages that do not have enough resources to train specific models. The contributions of this study are; 1) a robust approach that utilizes machine translation to reuse a model trained on one language in other languages, 2) an RNN-based approach to eliminate feature extraction as well as resource requirements for sentiment analysis, and 3) a technique that statistically significantly outperforms baselines for multilingual sentiment analysis task when data is limited. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to apply a deep learning model to the multilingual sentiment analysis task.