Refining Word Embeddings with Sentiment Information for Sentiment Analysis

Natural Language Processing problems generally require the use of pretrained distributed word representations to be solved with deep learning models. However, distributed representations usually rely on contextual information which prevents them from learning all the important word characteristics. The task of sentiment analysis suffers from such a problem because sentiment information is ignored during the process of learning word embeddings. The performance of sentiment analysis can be affected since two words with similar vectors may have opposite sentiment orientations. The present paper introduces a novel model called Continuous Sentiment Contextualized Vectors (CSCV) to address this problem. The proposed model can learn word sentiment embedding using its surrounding context words. It uses Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) model to deal with the context and sentiment lexicons to identify sentiment. Existing pre-trained vectors are combined then with the obtained sentiment vectors using Principal component analysis (PCA) to enhance their quality. The experiments show that: (1) CSCV vectors can be used to enhance any pre-trained word vectors; (2) The result vectors strongly alleviate the problem of similar words with opposite polarities; (3) The performance of sentiment classification is improved by applying this approach.