Improving Sentiment Classification Performance through Coaching Architectures

Abstract

Intelligent systems have been developed for years to solve specific tasks automatically. An important issue emerges when the information used by these systems exhibits a dynamic nature and evolves. This fact adds a level of complexity that makes these systems prone to a noticeable worsening of their performance. Thus, their capabilities have to be upgraded to address these new requirements. Furthermore, this problem is even more challenging when the information comes from human individuals and their interactions through language. This issue happens more easily and forcefully in the specific domain of Sentiment Analysis, where feelings and opinions of humans are in constant evolution. In this context, systems are trained with an enormous corpus of textual content, or they include an extensive set of words and their related sentiment values. These solutions are usually static and generic, making their manual upgrading almost unworkable. In this paper, an automatic and interactive coaching architecture is proposed. It includes a ML framework and a dictionary-based system both trained for a specific domain. These systems converse about the outcomes obtained during their respective learning stages by simulating human interactive coaching sessions. This leads to an Active Learning process where the dictionary-based system acquires new information and improves its performance. More than 800, 000 tweets have been gathered and processed for experiments. Outstanding results were obtained when the proposed architecture was used. Also, the lexicon was updated with the prior and new words related to the corpus used which is important to reach a better sentiment analysis classification.