Fusing Phonetic Features and Chinese Character Representation for Sentiment Analysis

Haiyun Peng, Soujanya Poria, Yang Li, Erik Cambria

Abstract: The Chinese pronunciation system offers two characteristics that distinguish it from other languages: deep phonemic orthography and intonation variations. We are the first to argue that these two important properties can play a major role in Chinese sentiment analysis. Hence, we learn phonetic features of Chinese characters and fuse them with their textual and visual features in order to mimic the way humans read and understand Chinese text. Experimental results on five different Chinese sentiment analysis datasets show that the inclusion of phonetic features significantly and consistently improves the performance of textual and visual representations.