Sentiment Classification with Supervised Sequence Embedding

Dmitriy Bespalov, Yanjun Qi, Bing Bai, Ali Shokoufandeh

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for modeling n-grams in a latent space learned from supervised signals. The proposed procedure uses only unigram features to model short phrases (n-grams) in the latent space. The phrases are then combined to form document-level latent representation for a given text, where position of an n-gram in the document is used to compute corresponding combining weight. The resulting two-stage supervised embedding is then coupled with a classifier to form an end-to-end system that we apply to the large-scale sentiment classification task. The proposed model does not require feature selection to retain effective features during pre-processing, and its parameter space grows linearly with size of n-gram. We present comparative evaluations of this method using two large-scale datasets for sentiment classification in online reviews (Amazon and TripAdvisor). The proposed method outperforms standard baselines that rely on bag-of-words representation populated with n-gram features.