Learning Bilingual Sentiment-Specific Word Embeddings without Cross-lingual Supervision

Yanlin Feng, Xiaojun Wan

Abstract
Word embeddings learned in two languages can be mapped to a common space to produce Bilingual Word Embeddings (BWE). Unsupervised BWE methods learn such a mapping without any parallel data. However, these methods are mainly evaluated on tasks of word translation or word similarity. We show that these methods fail to capture the sentiment information and do not perform well enough on cross-lingual sentiment analysis. In this work, we propose UBiSE (Unsupervised Bilingual Sentiment Embeddings), which learns sentiment-specific word representations for two languages in a common space without any cross-lingual supervision. Our method only requires a sentiment corpus in the source language and pretrained monolingual word embeddings of both languages. We evaluate our method on three language pairs for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous unsupervised BWE methods and even supervised BWE methods. Our method succeeds for a distant language pair English-Basque.
Anthology ID:
N19-1040
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
420–429
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1040
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1040
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanlin Feng and Xiaojun Wan. 2019. Learning Bilingual Sentiment-Specific Word Embeddings without Cross-lingual Supervision. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 420–429, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Bilingual Sentiment-Specific Word Embeddings without Cross-lingual Supervision (Feng & Wan, NAACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/N19-1040.pdf
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