Hierarchical Attention Transfer Network for Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification

2018-02-08

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 32

Volume

Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2018

Main Track: NLP and Text Mining

Cross-domain sentiment classification aims to leverage useful information in a source domain to help do sentiment classification in a target domain that has no or little supervised information. Existing cross-domain sentiment classification methods cannot automatically capture non-pivots, i.e., the domain-specific sentiment words, and pivots, i.e., the domain-shared sentiment words, simultaneously. In order to solve this problem, we propose a Hierarchical Attention Transfer Network (HATN) for cross-domain sentiment classification. The proposed HATN provides a hierarchical attention transfer mechanism which can transfer attentions for emotions across domains by automatically capturing pivots and non-pivots. Besides, the hierarchy of the attention mechanism mirrors the hierarchical structure of documents, which can help locate the pivots and non-pivots better. The proposed HATN consists of two hierarchical attention networks, with one named P-net aiming to find the pivots and the other named NP-net aligning the non-pivots by using the pivots as a bridge. Specifically, P-net firstly conducts individual attention learning to provide positive and negative pivots for NP-net. Then, P-net and NP-net conduct joint attention learning such that the HATN can simultaneously capture pivots and non-pivots and realize transferring attentions for emotions across domains. Experiments on the Amazon review dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of HATN.

10.1609/aaai.v32i1.12055