Sentiment Analysis via Deep Multichannel Neural Networks with Variational Information Bottleneck

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce, online consumption has become a mainstream form of consumption in recent years. Text sentiment analysis for a large number of customer reviews on the e-commerce platform can dramatically improve the customers' consumption experience. Although the sentiment analysis approaches based on deep neural network can achieve higher accuracy without human-design features compared with traditional sentiment analysis methods, the accuracy still cannot meet the demand and the training suffers from the issues of over-fitting, vanishing gradient, etc. In this paper, a novel sentiment analysis model named MBGCV is designed to alleviate these problems and improve the accuracy, MBGCV employs a multichannel paradigm and integrates Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB). The multichannel is exploited to extract multi-grained sentiment features. In each channel, BiGRU is utilized to extract context information, and then CNN is adopted to extract local features. Furthermore, the model combines the advantages of VIB and Maxout activation function to overcome shortcomings such as over-fitting, vanishing gradient in existing sentiment analysis models. By using real review datasets, we carry out extensive experiments to demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve superior accuracy and improve the performance of text sentiment analysis.