Multilingual Multi-class Sentiment Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper describes a language-independent model for multi-class sentiment analysis using a simple neural network architecture of five layers (Embedding, Conv1D, GlobalMaxPooling and two Fully-Connected). The advantage of the proposed model is that it does not rely on language-specific features such as ontologies, dictionaries, or morphological or syntactic pre-processing. Equally important, our system does not use pre-trained word2vec embeddings which can be costly to obtain and train for some languages. In this research, we also demonstrate that oversampling can be an effective approach for correcting class imbalance in the data. We evaluate our methods on three publicly available datasets for English, German and Arabic, and the results show that our system’s performance is comparable to, or even better than, the state of the art for these datasets. We make our source-code publicly available.

• Natural Language Processing