Expanding Subjective Lexicons for Social Media Mining with Embedding Subspaces

Abstract: Recent approaches for sentiment lexicon induction have capitalized on pre-trained word embeddings that capture latent semantic properties. However, embeddings obtained by optimizing performance of a given task (e.g. predicting contextual words) are sub-optimal for other applications. In this paper, we address this problem by exploiting task-specific representations, induced via embedding sub-space projection. This allows us to expand lexicons describing multiple semantic properties. For each property, our model jointly learns suitable representations and the concomitant predictor. Experiments conducted over multiple subjective lexicons, show that our model outperforms previous work and other baselines; even in low training data regimes. Furthermore, lexicon-based sentiment classifiers built on top of our lexicons outperform similar resources and yield performances comparable to those of supervised models.