Domain Adaptation for Sentiment Analysis Using Robust Internal Representations

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a costly yet necessary task for enterprises to study the opinions of their customers to improve their products and to determine optimal marketing strategies. Due to the existence of a wide range of domains across different products and services, cross-domain sentiment analysis methods have received significant attention. These methods mitigate the domain gap between different applications by training cross-domain generalizable classifiers which relax the need for data annotation for each domain. We develop a domain adaptation method which induces large margins between data representations that belong to different classes in an embedding space. This embedding space is trained to be domain-agnostic by matching the data distributions across the domains. Large interclass margins in the source domain help to reduce the effect of ``domain shift'' in the target domain. Theoretical and empirical analysis are provided to demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.