Towards a universal sentiment classifier in multiple languages

Abstract

Existing sentiment classifiers usually work for only one specific language, and different classification models are used in different languages. In this paper we aim to build a universal sentiment classifier with a single classification model in multiple different languages. In order to achieve this goal, we propose to learn multilingual sentiment-aware word embeddings simultaneously based only on the labeled reviews in English and unlabeled parallel data available in a few language pairs. It is not required that the parallel data exist between English and any other language, because the sentiment information can be transferred into any language via pivot languages. We present the evaluation results of our universal sentiment classifier in five languages, and the results are very promising even when the parallel data between English and the target languages are not used. Furthermore, the universal single classifier is compared with a few cross-language sentiment classifiers relying on direct parallel data between the source and target languages, and the results show that the performance of our universal sentiment classifier is very promising compared to that of different cross-language classifiers in multiple target languages.