Compositional Matrix-Space Models for Sentiment Analysis

We present a general learning-based approach for phrase-level sentiment analysis that adopts an ordinal sentiment scale and is explicitly compositional in nature. Thus, we can model the compositional effects required for accurate assignment of phrase-level sentiment. For example, combining an adverb (e.g., “very”) with a positive polar adjective (e.g., “good”) produces a phrase (“very good”) with increased polarity over the adjective alone. Inspired by recent work on distributional approaches to compositionality, we model each word as a matrix and combine words using iterated matrix multiplication, which allows for the modeling of both additive and multiplicative semantic effects. Although the multiplication-based matrix-space framework has been shown to be a theoretically elegant way to model composition (Rudolph and Giesbrecht, 2010), training such models has to be done carefully: the optimization is nonconvex and requires a good initial starting point. This paper presen...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Ainur Yessenalina, Claire Cardie
• Keywords: EMNLP 2011, Matrix Multiplication, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Composition, Sentiment Analysis