Topic-Based Microblog Polarity Classification Based on Cascaded Model

Given a microblog post and a topic, it is an important task to judge the sentiment towards that topic: positive or negative, and has important theoretical and application value in the public opinion analysis, personalized recommendation, product comparison analysis, prevention of terrorist attacks, etc. Because of the short and irregular messages as well as containing multifarious features such as emoticons, and sentiment of a microblog post is closely related to its topic, most existing approaches cannot perfectly achieve cooperating analysis of topic and sentiment of messages, and even cannot know what factors actually determined the sentiment towards that topic. To address the issues, MB-LDA model and attention network are applied to Bi-RNN for topic-based microblog polarity classification. Our cascaded model has three distinctive characteristics: (i) a strong relationship between topic and its sentiment is considered; (ii) the factors that affect the topic’s sentiment are identified, and the degree of influence of each factor can be calculated; (iii) the synchronized detection of the topic and its sentiment in microblog is achieved. Extensive experiments show that our cascaded model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approach JST and supervised approach SSA-ST significantly in terms of sentiment classification accuracy and F1-Measure.