This paper proposes a method for identifying and studying viral moments or highlights during a political debate. Using a combined strategy of time series analysis and domain adapted word embeddings, this study provides an in-depth analysis of several key moments during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. First, a time series outlier analysis is used to identify key moments during the debate. These moments had to result in a long-term shift in attention towards either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (i.e., a transient change outlier or an intervention, resulting in a permanent change in the time series). To assess whether these moments also resulted in a discursive shift, two corpora are produced for each potential viral moment (a pre-viral corpus and post-viral corpus). A domain adaptation layer learns weights to combine a generic and domain-specific (DS) word embedding into a domain adapted (DA) embedding. Words are then classified using a generic encoder+ classifier framework that relies on these word embeddings as inputs. Results suggest that both Clinton and Trump were able to induce discourse-shifting viral moments, though the former is much better at producing a topically-specific discursive shift.

This paper proposes a way to improve the performance of existing algorithms for text classification in domains with strong language semantics. A proposed domain adaptation layer learns weights to combine a generic and a domain specific (DS) word embedding into a domain adapted (DA) embedding. The DA word embeddings are then used as inputs to a generic encoder + classifier framework to perform a downstream task such as classification. This adaptation layer is particularly suited to data sets that are modest in size, and which are, therefore, not ideal candidates for (re)training a deep neural network architecture. Results on binary and multi-class classification tasks using popular encoder architectures, including current state-of-the-art methods (with and without the shallow adaptation layer) show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This research proposal describes two algorithms that are aimed at learning word embeddings for data sparse and sentiment rich data sets. The goal is to use word embeddings adapted for domain specific data sets in downstream applications such as sentiment classification. The first approach learns word embeddings in a supervised fashion via SWESA (Supervised Word Embeddings for Sentiment Analysis), an algorithm for sentiment analysis on data sets that are of modest size. SWESA leverages document labels to jointly learn polarity-aware word embeddings and a classifier to classify unseen documents. In the second approach domain adapted (DA) word embeddings are learned by exploiting the specificity of domain specific data sets and the breadth of generic word embeddings. The new embeddings are formed by aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA. Experimental results on binary sentiment classification tasks using both approaches for standard data sets are presented.

Standard word embedding algorithms learn vector representations from large corpora of text documents in an unsupervised fashion. However, the quality of word embeddings learned from these algorithms is affected by the size of training data sets. Thus, applications of these algorithms in domains with only moderate amounts of available data is limited. In this paper we introduce an algorithm that learns word embeddings jointly with a classifier. Our algorithm is called SWESA (Supervised Word Embeddings for Sentiment Analysis). SWESA leverages document label information to learn vector representations of words from a modest corpus of text documents by solving an optimization problem that minimizes a cost function with respect to both word embeddings and the weight vector used for classification. Experiments on several real world data sets show that SWESA has superior performance on domains with limited data, when compared to previously suggested approaches to word embeddings and sentiment analysis tasks.

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA. Evaluation results on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by first aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA (KCCA) and then combining them via convex optimization. Results from evaluation on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.