UniSent: Universal adaptable sentiment lexica for 1000+ languages

Ehsaneddin Asgari*, Fabienne Braune, Benjamin Roth, Christoph Ringlstetter, Mohammad R.K. Mofrad

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce UniSent universal sentiment lexica for 1000+ languages. Sentiment lexica are vital for sentiment analysis in absence of document-level annotations, a very common scenario for low-resource languages. To the best of our knowledge, UniSent is the largest sentiment resource to date in terms of the number of covered languages, including many low resource ones. In this work, we use a massively parallel Bible corpus to project sentiment information from English to other languages for sentiment analysis on Twitter data. We introduce a method called DomDrift to mitigate the huge domain mismatch between Bible and Twitter by a confidence weighting scheme that uses domain-specific embeddings to compare the nearest neighbors for a candidate sentiment word in the source (Bible) and target (Twitter) domain. We evaluate the quality of UniSent in a subset of languages for which manually created ground truth was available, Macedonian, Czech, German, Spanish, and French. We show that the quality of UniSent is comparable to manually created sentiment resources when it is used as the sentiment seed for the task of word sentiment prediction on top of embedding representations. In addition, we show that emoticon sentiments could be reliably predicted in the Twitter domain using only UniSent and monolingual embeddings in German, Spanish, French, and Italian. With the publication of this paper, we release the UniSent sentiment lexica at http://language-lab.info/unisent.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages4113-4120
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546344
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 - Marseille, France
Duration: 11 May 202016 May 2020

Publication series

NameLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings

Conference

Conference12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period11/05/2016/05/20

Keywords

  • 1000+ Languages
  • Embedding-based Domain Shift Detection
  • Universal Sentiment Lexicon

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