A sentiment polarity prediction model using transfer learning and its application to SNS flaming event detection

In recent years, with the popularization of SNS, the incidents called flaming, in which a large number of negative comments are retweeted and spread to many followers on SNS, are increasing. Since a flaming event sometimes causes severe criticism by public people, it is becoming a great thread to companies and therefore it is important for companies to protect their reputation from such flaming events. In order to protect companies from serious damages in reputation, we propose a machine learning approach to the detection of flaming events by monitoring the sentiment polarity of SNS comments. From the nature of SNS comments such as the spread of a large number of retweets with the same content for a short time, the word distributions are often strongly biased and it leads to poor performance in sentiment polarity prediction. To alleviate this problem, we introduce transfer learning into the conventional Naive Bayes classifier. More concretely, in the Naive Bayes classifier, the occurrence probabilities of words on a target domain are recalculated using those on other domains, where a domain corresponds to a company to be protected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed transfer learning contribute to the improvement in the sentiment polarity prediction for SNS comments. In addition, we show that the proposed system can detect flaming events correctly by monitoring the number of negative comments.