A message-passing multi-task architecture for the implicit event and polarity detection

PLoS One. 2021 Mar 1;16(3):e0247704. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247704. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Implicit sentiment analysis is a challenging task because the sentiment of a text is expressed in a connotative manner. To tackle this problem, we propose to use textual events as a knowledge source to enrich network representations. To consider task interactions, we present a novel lightweight joint learning paradigm that can pass task-related messages between tasks during training iterations. This is distinct from previous methods that involve multi-task learning by simple parameter sharing. Besides, a human-annotated corpus with implicit sentiment labels and event labels is scarce, which hinders practical applications of deep neural models. Therefore, we further investigate a back-translation approach to expand training instances. Experiment results on a public benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of both the proposed multi-task architecture and data augmentation strategy.

MeSH terms

  • Data Mining*
  • Humans
  • Learning
  • Multitasking Behavior
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.