Building Large-Scale Twitter-Specific Sentiment Lexicon : A Representation Learning Approach

In this paper, we propose to build large-scale sentiment lexicon from Twitter with a representation learning approach. We cast sentiment lexicon learning as a phrase-level sentiment classification task. The challenges are developing effective feature representation of phrases and obtaining training data with minor manual annotations for building the sentiment classifier. Specifically, we develop a dedicated neural architecture and integrate the sentiment information of text (e.g. sentences or tweets) into its hybrid loss function for learning sentiment-specific phrase embedding (SSPE). The neural network is trained from massive tweets collected with positive and negative emoticons, without any manual annotation. Furthermore, we introduce the Urban Dictionary to expand a small number of sentiment seeds to obtain more training data for building the phrase-level sentiment classifier. We evaluate our sentiment lexicon (TS-Lex) by applying it in a supervised learning framework for Twitter sentiment classification. Experiment results on the benchmark dataset of SemEval 2013 show that, TS-Lex yields better performance than previously introduced sentiment lexicons.