Jeremy Barnes

CL
h-index69
31papers
13,981citations
Novelty31%
AI Score35

31 Papers

CLMar 24, 2022
Direct parsing to sentiment graphs

David Samuel, Jeremy Barnes, Robin Kurtz et al.

This paper demonstrates how a graph-based semantic parser can be applied to the task of structured sentiment analysis, directly predicting sentiment graphs from text. We advance the state of the art on 4 out of 5 standard benchmark sets. We release the source code, models and predictions.

CLOct 12, 2022
Annotating Norwegian Language Varieties on Twitter for Part-of-Speech

Petter Mæhlum, Andre Kåsen, Samia Touileb et al.

Norwegian Twitter data poses an interesting challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. These texts are difficult for models trained on standardized text in one of the two Norwegian written forms (Bokmål and Nynorsk), as they contain both the typical variation of social media text, as well as a large amount of dialectal variety. In this paper we present a novel Norwegian Twitter dataset annotated with POS-tags. We show that models trained on Universal Dependency (UD) data perform worse when evaluated against this dataset, and that models trained on Bokmål generally perform better than those trained on Nynorsk. We also see that performance on dialectal tweets is comparable to the written standards for some models. Finally we perform a detailed analysis of the errors that models commonly make on this data.

CLApr 10, 2024Code
XNLIeu: a dataset for cross-lingual NLI in Basque

Maite Heredia, Julen Etxaniz, Muitze Zulaika et al.

XNLI is a popular Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmark widely used to evaluate cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities across languages. In this paper, we expand XNLI to include Basque, a low-resource language that can greatly benefit from transfer-learning approaches. The new dataset, dubbed XNLIeu, has been developed by first machine-translating the English XNLI corpus into Basque, followed by a manual post-edition step. We have conducted a series of experiments using mono- and multilingual LLMs to assess a) the effect of professional post-edition on the MT system; b) the best cross-lingual strategy for NLI in Basque; and c) whether the choice of the best cross-lingual strategy is influenced by the fact that the dataset is built by translation. The results show that post-edition is necessary and that the translate-train cross-lingual strategy obtains better results overall, although the gain is lower when tested in a dataset that has been built natively from scratch. Our code and datasets are publicly available under open licenses.

CLMar 21, 2025Code
Summarization Metrics for Spanish and Basque: Do Automatic Scores and LLM-Judges Correlate with Humans?

Jeremy Barnes, Naiara Perez, Alba Bonet-Jover et al.

Studies on evaluation metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge models for automatic text summarization have largely been focused on English, limiting our understanding of their effectiveness in other languages. Through our new dataset BASSE (BAsque and Spanish Summarization Evaluation), we address this situation by collecting human judgments on 2,040 abstractive summaries in Basque and Spanish, generated either manually or by five LLMs with four different prompts. For each summary, annotators evaluated five criteria on a 5-point Likert scale: coherence, consistency, fluency, relevance, and 5W1H. We use these data to reevaluate traditional automatic metrics used for evaluating summaries, as well as several LLM-as-a-Judge models that show strong performance on this task in English. Our results show that currently proprietary judge LLMs have the highest correlation with human judgments, followed by criteria-specific automatic metrics, while open-sourced judge LLMs perform poorly. We release BASSE and our code publicly, along with the first large-scale Basque summarization dataset containing 22,525 news articles with their subheads.

CLFeb 18, 2025Code
Conditioning LLMs to Generate Code-Switched Text

Maite Heredia, Gorka Labaka, Jeremy Barnes et al.

Code-switching (CS) is still a critical challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to interpret and generate code-switched text, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale CS datasets for training. This paper presents a novel methodology to generate CS data using LLMs, and test it on the English-Spanish language pair. We propose back-translating natural CS sentences into monolingual English, and using the resulting parallel corpus to fine-tune LLMs to turn monolingual sentences into CS. Unlike previous approaches to CS generation, our methodology uses natural CS data as a starting point, allowing models to learn its natural distribution beyond grammatical patterns. We thoroughly analyse the models' performance through a study on human preferences, a qualitative error analysis and an evaluation with popular automatic metrics. Results show that our methodology generates fluent code-switched text, expanding research opportunities in CS communication, and that traditional metrics do not correlate with human judgement when assessing the quality of the generated CS data. We release our code and generated dataset under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

CLApr 19, 2021Code
skweak: Weak Supervision Made Easy for NLP

Pierre Lison, Jeremy Barnes, Aliaksandr Hubin

We present skweak, a versatile, Python-based software toolkit enabling NLP developers to apply weak supervision to a wide range of NLP tasks. Weak supervision is an emerging machine learning paradigm based on a simple idea: instead of labelling data points by hand, we use labelling functions derived from domain knowledge to automatically obtain annotations for a given dataset. The resulting labels are then aggregated with a generative model that estimates the accuracy (and possible confusions) of each labelling function. The skweak toolkit makes it easy to implement a large spectrum of labelling functions (such as heuristics, gazetteers, neural models or linguistic constraints) on text data, apply them on a corpus, and aggregate their results in a fully unsupervised fashion. skweak is especially designed to facilitate the use of weak supervision for NLP tasks such as text classification and sequence labelling. We illustrate the use of skweak for NER and sentiment analysis. skweak is released under an open-source license and is available at: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/skweak

CLOct 16, 2020Code
Multi-task Learning of Negation and Speculation for Targeted Sentiment Classification

Andrew Moore, Jeremy Barnes

The majority of work in targeted sentiment analysis has concentrated on finding better methods to improve the overall results. Within this paper we show that these models are not robust to linguistic phenomena, specifically negation and speculation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning method to incorporate information from syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks, including negation and speculation scope detection, to create English-language models that are more robust to these phenomena. Further we create two challenge datasets to evaluate model performance on negated and speculative samples. We find that multi-task models and transfer learning via language modelling can improve performance on these challenge datasets, but the overall performances indicate that there is still much room for improvement. We release both the datasets and the source code at https://github.com/jerbarnes/multitask_negation_for_targeted_sentiment.

CLApr 8, 2020Code
Cross-lingual Emotion Intensity Prediction

Irean Navas Alejo, Toni Badia, Jeremy Barnes

Emotion intensity prediction determines the degree or intensity of an emotion that the author expresses in a text, extending previous categorical approaches to emotion detection. While most previous work on this topic has concentrated on English texts, other languages would also benefit from fine-grained emotion classification, preferably without having to recreate the amount of annotated data available in English in each new language. Consequently, we explore cross-lingual transfer approaches for fine-grained emotion detection in Spanish and Catalan tweets. To this end we annotate a test set of Spanish and Catalan tweets using Best-Worst scaling. We compare six cross-lingual approaches, e.g., machine translation and cross-lingual embeddings, which have varying requirements for parallel data -- from millions of parallel sentences to completely unsupervised. The results show that on this data, methods with low parallel-data requirements perform surprisingly better than methods that use more parallel data, which we explain through an in-depth error analysis. We make the dataset and the code available at \url{https://github.com/jerbarnes/fine-grained_cross-lingual_emotion}

CLJun 13, 2019Code
Sentiment analysis is not solved! Assessing and probing sentiment classification

Jeremy Barnes, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal

Neural methods for SA have led to quantitative improvements over previous approaches, but these advances are not always accompanied with a thorough analysis of the qualitative differences. Therefore, it is not clear what outstanding conceptual challenges for sentiment analysis remain. In this work, we attempt to discover what challenges still prove a problem for sentiment classifiers for English and to provide a challenging dataset. We collect the subset of sentences that an (oracle) ensemble of state-of-the-art sentiment classifiers misclassify and then annotate them for 18 linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena, such as negation, sarcasm, modality, etc. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ltgoslo/assessing_and_probing_sentiment. Finally, we provide a case study that demonstrates the usefulness of the dataset to probe the performance of a given sentiment classifier with respect to linguistic phenomena.

CLJun 12, 2018Code
Projecting Embeddings for Domain Adaptation: Joint Modeling of Sentiment Analysis in Diverse Domains

Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, Sabine Schulte im Walde

Domain adaptation for sentiment analysis is challenging due to the fact that supervised classifiers are very sensitive to changes in domain. The two most prominent approaches to this problem are structural correspondence learning and autoencoders. However, they either require long training times or suffer greatly on highly divergent domains. Inspired by recent advances in cross-lingual sentiment analysis, we provide a novel perspective and cast the domain adaptation problem as an embedding projection task. Our model takes as input two mono-domain embedding spaces and learns to project them to a bi-domain space, which is jointly optimized to (1) project across domains and to (2) predict sentiment. We perform domain adaptation experiments on 20 source-target domain pairs for sentiment classification and report novel state-of-the-art results on 11 domain pairs, including the Amazon domain adaptation datasets and SemEval 2013 and 2016 datasets. Our analysis shows that our model performs comparably to state-of-the-art approaches on domains that are similar, while performing significantly better on highly divergent domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/jbarnesspain/domain_blse

CLFeb 5, 2024
English Prompts are Better for NLI-based Zero-Shot Emotion Classification than Target-Language Prompts

Patrick Bareiß, Roman Klinger, Jeremy Barnes

Emotion classification in text is a challenging task due to the processes involved when interpreting a textual description of a potential emotion stimulus. In addition, the set of emotion categories is highly domain-specific. For instance, literature analysis might require the use of aesthetic emotions (e.g., finding something beautiful), and social media analysis could benefit from fine-grained sets (e.g., separating anger from annoyance) than only those that represent basic categories as they have been proposed by Paul Ekman (anger, disgust, fear, joy, surprise, sadness). This renders the task an interesting field for zero-shot classifications, in which the label set is not known at model development time. Unfortunately, most resources for emotion analysis are English, and therefore, most studies on emotion analysis have been performed in English, including those that involve prompting language models for text labels. This leaves us with a research gap that we address in this paper: In which language should we prompt for emotion labels on non-English texts? This is particularly of interest when we have access to a multilingual large language model, because we could request labels with English prompts even for non-English data. Our experiments with natural language inference-based language models show that it is consistently better to use English prompts even if the data is in a different language.

CLFeb 13, 2025
Truth Knows No Language: Evaluating Truthfulness Beyond English

Blanca Calvo Figueras, Eneko Sagarzazu, Julen Etxaniz et al.

We introduce a professionally translated extension of the TruthfulQA benchmark designed to evaluate truthfulness in Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. Truthfulness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) have primarily been conducted in English. However, the ability of LLMs to maintain truthfulness across languages remains under-explored. Our study evaluates 12 state-of-the-art open LLMs, comparing base and instruction-tuned models using human evaluation, multiple-choice metrics, and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. Our findings reveal that, while LLMs perform best in English and worst in Basque (the lowest-resourced language), overall truthfulness discrepancies across languages are smaller than anticipated. Furthermore, we show that LLM-as-a-Judge correlates more closely with human judgments than multiple-choice metrics, and that informativeness plays a critical role in truthfulness assessment. Our results also indicate that machine translation provides a viable approach for extending truthfulness benchmarks to additional languages, offering a scalable alternative to professional translation. Finally, we observe that universal knowledge questions are better handled across languages than context- and time-dependent ones, highlighting the need for truthfulness evaluations that account for cultural and temporal variability. Dataset and code are publicly available under open licenses.

CLMar 5, 2025
Vision-Language Models Struggle to Align Entities across Modalities

Iñigo Alonso, Gorka Azkune, Ander Salaberria et al.

Cross-modal entity linking refers to the ability to align entities and their attributes across different modalities. While cross-modal entity linking is a fundamental skill needed for real-world applications such as multimodal code generation, fake news detection, or scene understanding, it has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new task and benchmark to address this gap. Our benchmark, MATE, consists of 5.5k evaluation instances featuring visual scenes aligned with their textual representations. To evaluate cross-modal entity linking performance, we design a question-answering task that involves retrieving one attribute of an object in one modality based on a unique attribute of that object in another modality. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and humans on this task, and find that VLMs struggle significantly compared to humans, particularly as the number of objects in the scene increases. Our analysis also shows that, while chain-of-thought prompting can improve VLM performance, models remain far from achieving human-level proficiency. These findings highlight the need for further research in cross-modal entity linking and show that MATE is a strong benchmark to support that progress.

CYFeb 27, 2025
Societal Alignment Frameworks Can Improve LLM Alignment

Karolina Stańczak, Nicholas Meade, Mehar Bhatia et al. · eth-zurich

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on producing responses that meet human expectations and align with shared values - a process coined alignment. However, aligning LLMs remains challenging due to the inherent disconnect between the complexity of human values and the narrow nature of the technological approaches designed to address them. Current alignment methods often lead to misspecified objectives, reflecting the broader issue of incomplete contracts, the impracticality of specifying a contract between a model developer, and the model that accounts for every scenario in LLM alignment. In this paper, we argue that improving LLM alignment requires incorporating insights from societal alignment frameworks, including social, economic, and contractual alignment, and discuss potential solutions drawn from these domains. Given the role of uncertainty within societal alignment frameworks, we then investigate how it manifests in LLM alignment. We end our discussion by offering an alternative view on LLM alignment, framing the underspecified nature of its objectives as an opportunity rather than perfect their specification. Beyond technical improvements in LLM alignment, we discuss the need for participatory alignment interface designs.

CLDec 13, 2024
HiTZ at VarDial 2025 NorSID: Overcoming Data Scarcity with Language Transfer and Automatic Data Annotation

Jaione Bengoetxea, Mikel Zubillaga, Ekhi Azurmendi et al.

In this paper we present our submission for the NorSID Shared Task as part of the 2025 VarDial Workshop (Scherrer et al., 2025), consisting of three tasks: Intent Detection, Slot Filling and Dialect Identification, evaluated using data in different dialects of the Norwegian language. For Intent Detection and Slot Filling, we have fine-tuned a multitask model in a cross-lingual setting, to leverage the xSID dataset available in 17 languages. In the case of Dialect Identification, our final submission consists of a model fine-tuned on the provided development set, which has obtained the highest scores within our experiments. Our final results on the test set show that our models do not drop in performance compared to the development set, likely due to the domain-specificity of the dataset and the similar distribution of both subsets. Finally, we also report an in-depth analysis of the provided datasets and their artifacts, as well as other sets of experiments that have been carried out but did not yield the best results. Additionally, we present an analysis on the reasons why some methods have been more successful than others; mainly the impact of the combination of languages and domain-specificity of the training data on the results.

CLFeb 5, 2025
EuskañolDS: A Naturally Sourced Corpus for Basque-Spanish Code-Switching

Maite Heredia, Jeremy Barnes, Aitor Soroa

Code-switching (CS) remains a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), mainly due a lack of relevant data. In the context of the contact between the Basque and Spanish languages in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, CS frequently occurs in both formal and informal spontaneous interactions. However, resources to analyse this phenomenon and support the development and evaluation of models capable of understanding and generating code-switched language for this language pair are almost non-existent. We introduce a first approach to develop a naturally sourced corpus for Basque-Spanish code-switching. Our methodology consists of identifying CS texts from previously available corpora using language identification models, which are then manually validated to obtain a reliable subset of CS instances. We present the properties of our corpus and make it available under the name EuskañolDS.

CLMay 30, 2021
Structured Sentiment Analysis as Dependency Graph Parsing

Jeremy Barnes, Robin Kurtz, Stephan Oepen et al.

Structured sentiment analysis attempts to extract full opinion tuples from a text, but over time this task has been subdivided into smaller and smaller sub-tasks, e,g,, target extraction or targeted polarity classification. We argue that this division has become counterproductive and propose a new unified framework to remedy the situation. We cast the structured sentiment problem as dependency graph parsing, where the nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and the arcs are the relations between them. We perform experiments on five datasets in four languages (English, Norwegian, Basque, and Catalan) and show that this approach leads to strong improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis shows that refining the sentiment graphs with syntactic dependency information further improves results.

CLMay 16, 2021
The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus

Samia Touileb, Jeremy Barnes

Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay between language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less studied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annotations for sentiment and topic categories. We perform baseline experiments by fine-tuning multi-lingual language models. We further explore the effect of script vs. language similarity in cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multi-lingual models on languages which are a) typologically distinct, but use the same script, b) typologically similar, but use a distinct script, or c) are typologically similar and use the same script. We find there is a delicate relationship between script and typology for part-of-speech, while sentiment analysis is less sensitive.

CLApr 13, 2021
Large-Scale Contextualised Language Modelling for Norwegian

Andrey Kutuzov, Jeremy Barnes, Erik Velldal et al.

We present the ongoing NorLM initiative to support the creation and use of very large contextualised language models for Norwegian (and in principle other Nordic languages), including a ready-to-use software environment, as well as an experience report for data preparation and training. This paper introduces the first large-scale monolingual language models for Norwegian, based on both the ELMo and BERT frameworks. In addition to detailing the training process, we present contrastive benchmark results on a suite of NLP tasks for Norwegian. For additional background and access to the data, models, and software, please see http://norlm.nlpl.eu

CLApr 11, 2021
NorDial: A Preliminary Corpus of Written Norwegian Dialect Use

Jeremy Barnes, Petter Mæhlum, Samia Touileb

Norway has a large amount of dialectal variation, as well as a general tolerance to its use in the public sphere. There are, however, few available resources to study this variation and its change over time and in more informal areas, \eg on social media. In this paper, we propose a first step to creating a corpus of dialectal variation of written Norwegian. We collect a small corpus of tweets and manually annotate them as Bokmål, Nynorsk, any dialect, or a mix. We further perform preliminary experiments with state-of-the-art models, as well as an analysis of the data to expand this corpus in the future. Finally, we make the annotations and models available for future work.

CLJan 30, 2021
If you've got it, flaunt it: Making the most of fine-grained sentiment annotations

Jeremy Barnes, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal

Fine-grained sentiment analysis attempts to extract sentiment holders, targets and polar expressions and resolve the relationship between them, but progress has been hampered by the difficulty of annotation. Targeted sentiment analysis, on the other hand, is a more narrow task, focusing on extracting sentiment targets and classifying their polarity.In this paper, we explore whether incorporating holder and expression information can improve target extraction and classification and perform experiments on eight English datasets. We conclude that jointly predicting target and polarity BIO labels improves target extraction, and that augmenting the input text with gold expressions generally improves targeted polarity classification. This highlights the potential importance of annotating expressions for fine-grained sentiment datasets. At the same time, our results show that performance of current models for predicting polar expressions is poor, hampering the benefit of this information in practice.

CLApr 30, 2020
Named Entity Recognition without Labelled Data: A Weak Supervision Approach

Pierre Lison, Aliaksandr Hubin, Jeremy Barnes et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance often degrades rapidly when applied to target domains that differ from the texts observed during training. When in-domain labelled data is available, transfer learning techniques can be used to adapt existing NER models to the target domain. But what should one do when there is no hand-labelled data for the target domain? This paper presents a simple but powerful approach to learn NER models in the absence of labelled data through weak supervision. The approach relies on a broad spectrum of labelling functions to automatically annotate texts from the target domain. These annotations are then merged together using a hidden Markov model which captures the varying accuracies and confusions of the labelling functions. A sequence labelling model can finally be trained on the basis of this unified annotation. We evaluate the approach on two English datasets (CoNLL 2003 and news articles from Reuters and Bloomberg) and demonstrate an improvement of about 7 percentage points in entity-level $F_1$ scores compared to an out-of-domain neural NER model.

CLFeb 19, 2020
A Systematic Comparison of Architectures for Document-Level Sentiment Classification

Jeremy Barnes, Vinit Ravishankar, Lilja Øvrelid et al.

Documents are composed of smaller pieces - paragraphs, sentences, and tokens - that have complex relationships between one another. Sentiment classification models that take into account the structure inherent in these documents have a theoretical advantage over those that do not. At the same time, transfer learning models based on language model pretraining have shown promise for document classification. However, these two paradigms have not been systematically compared and it is not clear under which circumstances one approach is better than the other. In this work we empirically compare hierarchical models and transfer learning for document-level sentiment classification. We show that non-trivial hierarchical models outperform previous baselines and transfer learning on document-level sentiment classification in five languages.

CLNov 28, 2019
A Fine-Grained Sentiment Dataset for Norwegian

Lilja Øvrelid, Petter Mæhlum, Jeremy Barnes et al.

We introduce NoReC_fine, a dataset for fine-grained sentiment analysis in Norwegian, annotated with respect to polar expressions, targets and holders of opinion. The underlying texts are taken from a corpus of professionally authored reviews from multiple news-sources and across a wide variety of domains, including literature, games, music, products, movies and more. We here present a detailed description of this annotation effort. We provide an overview of the developed annotation guidelines, illustrated with examples, and present an analysis of inter-annotator agreement. We also report the first experimental results on the dataset, intended as a preliminary benchmark for further experiments.

CLJun 24, 2019
Embedding Projection for Targeted Cross-Lingual Sentiment: Model Comparisons and a Real-World Study

Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger

Sentiment analysis benefits from large, hand-annotated resources in order to train and test machine learning models, which are often data hungry. While some languages, e.g., English, have a vast array of these resources, most under-resourced languages do not, especially for fine-grained sentiment tasks, such as aspect-level or targeted sentiment analysis. To improve this situation, we propose a cross-lingual approach to sentiment analysis that is applicable to under-resourced languages and takes into account target-level information. This model incorporates sentiment information into bilingual distributional representations, by jointly optimizing them for semantics and sentiment, showing state-of-the-art performance at sentence-level when combined with machine translation. The adaptation to targeted sentiment analysis on multiple domains shows that our model outperforms other projection-based bilingual embedding methods on binary targeted sentiment tasks. Our analysis on ten languages demonstrates that the amount of unlabeled monolingual data has surprisingly little effect on the sentiment results. As expected, the choice of annotated source language for projection to a target leads to better results for source-target language pairs which are similar. Therefore, our results suggest that more efforts should be spent on the creation of resources for less similar languages to those which are resource-rich already. Finally, a domain mismatch leads to a decreased performance. This suggests resources in any language should ideally cover varieties of domains.

CLJun 18, 2019
Improving Sentiment Analysis with Multi-task Learning of Negation

Jeremy Barnes, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid

Sentiment analysis is directly affected by compositional phenomena in language that act on the prior polarity of the words and phrases found in the text. Negation is the most prevalent of these phenomena and in order to correctly predict sentiment, a classifier must be able to identify negation and disentangle the effect that its scope has on the final polarity of a text. This paper proposes a multi-task approach to explicitly incorporate information about negation in sentiment analysis, which we show outperforms learning negation implicitly in a data-driven manner. We describe our approach, a cascading neural architecture with selective sharing of LSTM layers, and show that explicitly training the model with negation as an auxiliary task helps improve the main task of sentiment analysis. The effect is demonstrated across several different standard English-language data sets for both tasks and we analyze several aspects of our system related to its performance, varying types and amounts of input data and different multi-task setups.

CLJun 18, 2019
LTG-Oslo Hierarchical Multi-task Network: The importance of negation for document-level sentiment in Spanish

Jeremy Barnes

This paper details LTG-Oslo team's participation in the sentiment track of the NEGES 2019 evaluation campaign. We participated in the task with a hierarchical multi-task network, which used shared lower-layers in a deep BiLSTM to predict negation, while the higher layers were dedicated to predicting document-level sentiment. The multi-task component shows promise as a way to incorporate information on negation into deep neural sentiment classifiers, despite the fact that the absolute results on the test set were relatively low for a binary classification task.

CLJun 13, 2019
On the Effect of Word Order on Cross-lingual Sentiment Analysis

Àlex R. Atrio, Toni Badia, Jeremy Barnes

Current state-of-the-art models for sentiment analysis make use of word order either explicitly by pre-training on a language modeling objective or implicitly by using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional networks (CNNs). This is a problem for cross-lingual models that use bilingual embeddings as features, as the difference in word order between source and target languages is not resolved. In this work, we explore reordering as a pre-processing step for sentence-level cross-lingual sentiment classification with two language combinations (English-Spanish, English-Catalan). We find that while reordering helps both models, CNNS are more sensitive to local reorderings, while global reordering benefits RNNs.

CLMay 23, 2018
Bilingual Sentiment Embeddings: Joint Projection of Sentiment Across Languages

Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, Sabine Schulte im Walde

Sentiment analysis in low-resource languages suffers from a lack of annotated corpora to estimate high-performing models. Machine translation and bilingual word embeddings provide some relief through cross-lingual sentiment approaches. However, they either require large amounts of parallel data or do not sufficiently capture sentiment information. We introduce Bilingual Sentiment Embeddings (BLSE), which jointly represent sentiment information in a source and target language. This model only requires a small bilingual lexicon, a source-language corpus annotated for sentiment, and monolingual word embeddings for each language. We perform experiments on three language combinations (Spanish, Catalan, Basque) for sentence-level cross-lingual sentiment classification and find that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four out of six experimental setups, as well as capturing complementary information to machine translation. Our analysis of the resulting embedding space provides evidence that it represents sentiment information in the resource-poor target language without any annotated data in that language.

CLMar 22, 2018
MultiBooked: A Corpus of Basque and Catalan Hotel Reviews Annotated for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification

Jeremy Barnes, Patrik Lambert, Toni Badia

While sentiment analysis has become an established field in the NLP community, research into languages other than English has been hindered by the lack of resources. Although much research in multi-lingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has focused on unsupervised or semi-supervised approaches, these still require a large number of resources and do not reach the performance of supervised approaches. With this in mind, we introduce two datasets for supervised aspect-level sentiment analysis in Basque and Catalan, both of which are under-resourced languages. We provide high-quality annotations and benchmarks with the hope that they will be useful to the growing community of researchers working on these languages.

CLSep 13, 2017
Assessing State-of-the-Art Sentiment Models on State-of-the-Art Sentiment Datasets

Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, Sabine Schulte im Walde

There has been a good amount of progress in sentiment analysis over the past 10 years, including the proposal of new methods and the creation of benchmark datasets. In some papers, however, there is a tendency to compare models only on one or two datasets, either because of time restraints or because the model is tailored to a specific task. Accordingly, it is hard to understand how well a certain model generalizes across different tasks and datasets. In this paper, we contribute to this situation by comparing several models on six different benchmarks, which belong to different domains and additionally have different levels of granularity (binary, 3-class, 4-class and 5-class). We show that Bi-LSTMs perform well across datasets and that both LSTMs and Bi-LSTMs are particularly good at fine-grained sentiment tasks (i. e., with more than two classes). Incorporating sentiment information into word embeddings during training gives good results for datasets that are lexically similar to the training data. With our experiments, we contribute to a better understanding of the performance of different model architectures on different data sets. Consequently, we detect novel state-of-the-art results on the SenTube datasets.