Identifying transferable information across domains for cross-domain sentiment classification

Abstract

Getting manually labeled data in each domain is always an expensive and a time consuming task. Cross-domain sentiment analysis has emerged as a demanding concept where a labeled source domain facilitates a sentiment classifier for an unlabeled target domain. However, polarity orientation (positive or negative) and the significance of a word to express an opinion often differ from one domain to another domain. Owing to these differences, cross-domain sentiment classification is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose that words that do not change their polarity and significance represent the transferable (usable) information across domains for cross-domain sentiment classification. We present a novel approach based on χ2 test and cosine-similarity between context vector of words to identify polarity preserving significant words across domains. Furthermore, we show that a weighted ensemble of the classifiers enhances the cross-domain classification performance.