Bilingual Co-Training for Sentiment Classification of Chinese Product Reviews

The lack of reliable Chinese sentiment resources limits research progress on Chinese sentiment classification. However, there are many freely available English sentiment resources on the Web. This article focuses on the problem of cross-lingual sentiment classification, which leverages only available English resources for Chinese sentiment classification. We first investigate several basic methods (including lexicon-based methods and corpus-based methods) for cross-lingual sentiment classification by simply leveraging machine translation services to eliminate the language gap, and then propose a bilingual co-training approach to make use of both the English view and the Chinese view based on additional unlabeled Chinese data. Experimental results on two test sets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which can outperform basic methods and transductive methods.