A weakly supervised model for sentence-level semantic orientation analysis with multiple experts

We propose the weakly supervised Multi-Experts Model (MEM) for analyzing the semantic orientation of opinions expressed in natural language reviews. In contrast to most prior work, MEM predicts both opinion polarity and opinion strength at the level of individual sentences; such fine-grained analysis helps to understand better why users like or dislike the entity under review. A key challenge in this setting is that it is hard to obtain sentence-level training data for both polarity and strength. For this reason, MEM is weakly supervised: It starts with potentially noisy indicators obtained from coarse-grained training data (i.e., document-level ratings), a small set of diverse base predictors, and, if available, small amounts of fine-grained training data. We integrate these noisy indicators into a unified probabilistic framework using ideas from ensemble learning and graph-based semi-supervised learning. Our experiments indicate that MEM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.