An Ensemble Model for Cross-Domain Polarity Classification on Twitter

Polarity analysis of Social Media content is of significant importance for various applications. Most current approaches treat this task as a classification problem, demanding a labeled corpus for training purposes. However, if the learned model is applied on a different domain, the performance drops significantly and, given that it is impractical to have labeled corpora for every domain, this becomes a challenging task. In the current work, we address this problem, by proposing an ensemble classifier that is trained on a general domain and and adapts, without the need for additional ground truth, on the desired (test) domain before classifying a document. Our experiments are performed on three different datasets and the obtained results are compared with various baselines and state-of-the-art methods; we demonstrate that our model is outperforming all out-of-domain trained baseline algorithms, and that it is even comparable with different in-domain classifiers.