Holistic Sentiment Analysis Across Languages: Multilingual Supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation

In this paper, we develop multilingual supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (MLSLDA), a probabilistic generative model that allows insights gleaned from one language’s data to inform how the model captures properties of other languages. MLSLDA accomplishes this by jointly modeling two aspects of text: how multilingual concepts are clustered into thematically coherent topics and how topics associated with text connect to an observed regression variable (such as ratings on a sentiment scale). Concepts are represented in a general hierarchical framework that is flexible enough to express semantic ontologies, dictionaries, clustering constraints, and, as a special, degenerate case, conventional topic models. Both the topics and the regression are discovered via posterior inference from corpora. We show MLSLDA can build topics that are consistent across languages, discover sensible bilingual lexical correspondences, and leverage multilingual corpora to better predict sentiment. Sentiment analysis (Pang and Lee, 2008) offers the promise of automatically discerning how people feel about a product, person, organization, or issue based on what they write online, which is potentially of great value to businesses and other organizations. However, the vast majority of sentiment resources and algorithms are limited to a single language, usually English (Wilson, 2008; Baccianella and Sebastiani, 2010). Since no single language captures a majority of the content online, adopting such a limited approach in an increasingly global community risks missing important details and trends that might only be available when text in multiple languages is taken into account. Up to this point, multiple languages have been addressed in sentiment analysis primarily by transferring knowledge from a resource-rich language to a less rich language (Banea et al., 2008), or by ignoring differences in languages via translation into English (Denecke, 2008). These approaches are limited to a view of sentiment that takes place through an English-centric lens, and they ignore the potential to share information between languages. Ideally, learning sentiment cues holistically, across languages, would result in a richer and more globally consistent picture. In this paper, we introduce Multilingual Supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (MLSLDA), a model for sentiment analysis on a multilingual corpus. MLSLDA discovers a consistent, unified picture of sentiment across multiple languages by learning “topics,” probabilistic partitions of the vocabulary that are consistent in terms of both meaning and relevance to observed sentiment. Our approach makes few assumptions about available resources, requiring neither parallel corpora nor machine translation. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. In Section 1, we describe the probabilistic tools that we use to create consistent topics bridging across languages and the MLSLDA model. In Section 2, we present the inference process. We discuss our set of semantic bridges between languages in Section 3, and our experiments in Section 4 demonstrate that this approach functions as an effective multilingual topic model, discovers sentiment-biased topics, and uses multilingual corpora to make better sentiment predictions across languages. Sections 5 and 6 discuss related research and discusses future work, respectively. 1 Predictions from Multilingual Topics As its name suggests, MLSLDA is an extension of Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), a modeling approach that takes a corpus of unannotated documents as input and produces two outputs, a set of “topics” and assignments of documents to topics. Both the topics and the assignments are probabilistic: a topic is represented as a probability distribution over words in the corpus, and each document is assigned a probability distribution over all the topics. Topic models built on the foundations of LDA are appealing for sentiment analysis because the learned topics can cluster together sentimentbearing words, and because topic distributions are a parsimonious way to represent a document.1 LDA has been used to discover latent structure in text (e.g. for discourse segmentation (Purver et al., 2006) and authorship (Rosen-Zvi et al., 2004)). MLSLDA extends the approach by ensuring that this latent structure — the underlying topics — is consistent across languages. We discuss multilingual topic modeling in Section 1.1, and in Section 1.2 we show how this enables supervised regression regardless of a document’s language. 1.1 Capturing Semantic Correlations Topic models posit a straightforward generative process that creates an observed corpus. For each document d, some distribution θd over unobserved topics is chosen. Then, for each word position in the document, a topic z is selected. Finally, the word for that position is generated by selecting from the topic indexed by z. (Recall that in LDA, a “topic” is a distribution over words). In monolingual topic models, the topic distribution is usually drawn from a Dirichlet distribution. Using Dirichlet distributions makes it easy to specify sparse priors, and it also simplifies posterior inference because Dirichlet distributions are conjugate to multinomial distributions. However, drawing topics from Dirichlet distributions will not suffice if our vocabulary includes multiple languages. If we are working with English, German, and Chinese at the same time, a Dirichlet prior has no way to favor distributions z such that p(good|z), p(gut|z), and The latter property has also made LDA popular for information retrieval (Wei and Croft, 2006)). p(hǎo|z) all tend to be high at the same time, or low at the same time. More generally, the structure of our model must encourage topics to be consistent across languages, and Dirichlet distributions cannot encode correlations between elements. One possible solution to this problem is to use the multivariate normal distribution, which can produce correlated multinomials (Blei and Lafferty, 2005), in place of the Dirichlet distribution. This has been done successfully in multilingual settings (Cohen and Smith, 2009). However, such models complicate inference by not being conjugate. Instead, we appeal to tree-based extensions of the Dirichlet distribution, which has been used to induce correlation in semantic ontologies (Boyd-Graber et al., 2007) and to encode clustering constraints (Andrzejewski et al., 2009). The key idea in this approach is to assume the vocabularies of all languages are organized according to some shared semantic structure that can be represented as a tree. For concreteness in this section, we will use WordNet (Miller, 1990) as the representation of this multilingual semantic bridge, since it is well known, offers convenient and intuitive terminology, and demonstrates the full flexibility of our approach. However, the model we describe generalizes to any tree-structured representation of multilingual knowledge; we discuss some alternatives in Section 3. WordNet organizes a vocabulary into a rooted, directed acyclic graph of nodes called synsets, short for “synonym sets.” A synset is a child of another synset if it satisfies a hyponomy relationship; each child “is a” more specific instantiation of its parent concept (thus, hyponomy is often called an “isa” relationship). For example, a “dog” is a “canine” is an “animal” is a “living thing,” etc. As an approximation, it is not unreasonable to assume that WordNet’s structure of meaning is language independent, i.e. the concept encoded by a synset can be realized using terms in different languages that share the same meaning. In practice, this organization has been used to create many alignments of international WordNets to the original English WordNet (Ordan and Wintner, 2007; Sagot and Fišer, 2008; Isahara et al., 2008). Using the structure of WordNet, we can now describe a generative process that produces a distribution over a multilingual vocabulary, which encourages correlations between words with similar meanings regardless of what language each word is in. For each synset h, we create a multilingual word distribution for that synset as follows: 1. Draw transition probabilities βh ∼ Dir (τh) 2. Draw stop probabilities ωh ∼ Dir (κh) 3. For each language l, draw emission probabilities for that synset φh,l ∼ Dir (πh,l). For conciseness in the rest of the paper, we will refer to this generative process as multilingual Dirichlet hierarchy, or MULTDIRHIER(τ ,κ,π).2 Each observed token can be viewed as the end result of a sequence of visited synsets λ. At each node in the tree, the path can end at node i with probability ωi,1, or it can continue to a child synset with probability ωi,0. If the path continues to another child synset, it visits child j with probability βi,j . If the path ends at a synset, it generates word k with probability φi,l,k. The probability of a word being emitted from a path with visited synsets r and final synset h in language