2014 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT)

Recursive Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis

over Social Data
Changliang Li, Bo Xu, Gaowei Wu, Saike He, Guanhua Tian, Hongwei Hao,
Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences
95 Zhongguancun East Road, 100190,
BEIJING, CHINA
{changliang.li; xubo; gaowei.wu;saike.he;guanhua.tian;hongwei.hao}@ia.ac.cn

AbstractSentiment analysis has now become a popular
research problem to tackle in NLP field. However, there are very
few researches conducted on sentiment analysis for Chinese.
Progress is held back due to lack of large and labelled corpus and
powerful models. To remedy this deciency, we build a Chinese
Sentiment Treebank over social data. It concludes 13550 labeled
sentences which are from movie reviews. Furthermore, we
introduce a novel Recursive Neural Deep Model (RNDM) to
predict sentiment label based on recursive deep learning. We
consider the problem of classifying one sentence by overall
sentiment, determining a review is positive or negative. On
predicting sentiment label at sentence level, our model
outperforms other commonly used baselines, such as Nave Bayes,
Maximum Entropy and SVM, by a large margin.
KeywordsSentiment analysis; Chinese Sentiment Treebank;
recursive deep learning
I. INTRODUCTION
Sentiment analysis is the field of study that analyzes
peoples opinions, sentiments, evaluations, appraisals, attitudes,
and emotions towards entities such as products, services,
organizations, individuals, issues, events, topics, and their
attributes [1].
With the development of Web 2.0 and enormous growth of
social data in Internet, sentiment analysis has now become a
popular research problem to tackle. In contrast to Web sites
where people are limited to the passive viewing of content,
Web 2.0 may allow users to more easily express their views
and opinions on social networking sites, such as Twitter and
Facebook.
The opinion information they leave behind is of great value.
For example, by collecting movie reviews, film companies can
gather feedbacks from their customers to further improve their
products. Customers can decide which movie is worthy
watching based on fellow customers movie reviews. Hence, in
recent years, sentiment analysis has become a popular topic for
many research communities, including artificial intelligence
and natural language process.
There has been a large amount of prior research in
sentiment analysis, especially in the domain of product reviews,
movie reviews, and blogs. The work of [2] focused on
manually constructing several lexica and rules for both polar
words and related content-word negators, such as prevent
cancer, where prevent reverses the negative polarity of cancer.
The work of [3] introduced an approach based on CRFs with
hidden variables with very good performance. RNTN was
employed to predict sentiment label on phrases and full
sentence level [4].
However, there is relatively little investigation conducted
on Chinese sentiment analysis. Progress is held back in
Chinese sentiment analysis, due to lack of large and labelled
corpus and powerful models. To address this problem, we
introduce a Chinese Sentiment Treebank and a powerful
recursive deep model that can accurately predict the sentiment
label on sentence level in this new corpus. The corpus is based
on movie reviews from social networks. And it is the first
Chinese sentiment corpus with labeled parse trees. We
introduce a novel recursive neural deep model. Our model
represents a sentence through word vectors and a parse tree and
then computes vectors for higher nodes in the tree using the
same composition function.
Sentiment analysis at sentence level goes to the sentences
and determines whether each sentence expressed a positive,
negative, or neutral opinion. Neutral opinion usually means no
opinion. In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying
one sentence by overall sentiment, determining a review is
positive or negative.
Combination with the Chinese Sentiment Treebank, our
recursive deep model performs robust in predicting sentiment
label distributions. We compare to several baselines such as
Nave Bayes (NB), Maximum Entropy and SVM. Our model
achieves the best performance. Meanwhile, based on Chinese
Sentiment Treebank, all baseline models also obtain high
performance.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2,
we introduce some related work including word representations,
recursive deep learning and sentiment analysis. Section 3
introduces our Chinese Sentiment Treebank. Section 4
describes our recursive neural deep model. Section 5 presents
the experiments on predicting Chinese sentiment label. The
conclusion and future work are presented in Section 6.
II. RELATED WORK
This work is mainly connected to three areas of NLP
research: word representations, recursive deep learning and
sentiment analysis.

978-1-4799-4143-8/14 $31.00 2014 IEEE 180

DOI 10.1109/WI-IAT.2014.96
A. Word Representations
A word representation is a mathematical object associated
with each word, often a vector. Each dimensions value
corresponds to a feature and might even have a semantic or
grammatical interpretation, so we call it a word feature [5].
An effective approach to word representation is to learn
word embeddings. Each dimension of the embeddings
represents a latent feature of the word, hopefully capturing
useful syntactic and semantic properties [5]. Many approaches
have been proposed to learn good performance word
embeddings. There are some embeddings datasets publicly
available for evaluation, such as SENNAs embeddings [6],
Turians embeddings [5], HLBLs embeddings [7], Huangs
embeddings [8].
The training complexity is always a difficult problem of
training a variety of language models. It was recently proposed
using the distributed Skip-gram or continuous Bag-of-Words
(CBOW) models. These models learn word representations
using a simple neural network architecture that aims to predict
the neighbors of a word.
Due to its simplicity, the Skip-gram and CBOW models
can be trained on a large amount of text data. There is one
parallelized implementation can learn a model from billions of
words in hours [9]. Word2vec tool provides an efficient
implementation of the continuous bag-of-words and skip-gram
architectures for computing vector representations of words.
B. Recursive Deep Learning
Recursive neural networks (RNNs) are able to process
structured inputs by repeatedly applying the same neural
network at each node of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) [10].
The recursive use of parameters is the main difference with
standard neural networks. The inputs to all these replicated
feed forward networks are either given by using the childrens
labels to look up the associated representation or by their
previously computed representation.
The matrix-vector RNNs (MV-RNN) represent a word as
both a continuous vector and a matrix of parameters. It assigns
a vector and a matrix to every node in a parse tree: the vector
captures the inherent meaning of the constituent, while the
matrix captures how it changes the meaning of neighboring
words or phrases [11].
RNTN aims to build greater interactions between the input
vectors [4]. It takes as input phrases of any length. And it
utilizes the same tensor-based composition function for all
nodes. RNTN has been successfully utilized in predicting
phrase or sentence sentiment label.
C. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis touches every aspect of NLP, e.g.,
coreference resolution, negation handling, and word sense
disambiguation, which add more difficulties since these are not
solved problems in NLP [1].
However, it is also useful to realize that sentiment analysis
is a highly restricted NLP problem because the system does not
need to fully understand the semantics of each sentence or
document but only needs to understand some aspects of it, i.e.,
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positive or negative sentiments and their target entities or
topics [1].
A seed lexicon and a graph propagation framework were
employed to learn a larger sentiment lexicon [3]. Pang and Lee
[12] researched the performance of various machine learning
techniques (Nave Bayes, maximum entropy, and support
vector machines) in the specific domain of movie reviews.
Some existing supervised learning approaches employed
annotated corpora of manually labeled documents [13,14].
Several unsupervised learning approaches have also been
proposed based on given sentiment lexicons [15,16]. Various
joint sentiment and topic models were proposed to analyze
sentiment in detail [17,18,19]. An empirical method was
proposed on Chinese sentiment analysis [20]. Recently, some
models based on recursive neural networks have considerable
representational power, such as [4,10,11].
III. CHINESE SENTIMENT TREEBANK
There is little publicly available Chinese sentiment corpus.
To address this problem, we build the first corpus with labeled
parse trees that allows for a complete sentiment analysis. We
call the corpus as Chinese Sentiment Treebank.
We collected reviews of 2270 movies from
http://movie.douban.com/, which is a famous movie social
website with large amount of movie reviews. And then we
filtered the movie reviews which meet with any of the
following.
x with too many typos;
x with special symbols;
x with rude language;
x without labels;
x with more than one sentence;
x with multi-languages;
x too long sentences, for example the number of words in
one movie review is more than 30;
x too short sentences, for example the number of words in
one movie review is less than 5.
After filtering the unqualified movie reviews, we use
Chinese word segmentation tool ICTCLAS to segment all the
movie reviews.
Each sentence is labeled into 5 classes by humans. 0 means
very negative; 1 means negative; 2 mean neutral; 3 means
positive; 4 means very positive. In order to avoid collecting too
many reviews from one movie, the number of collected
reviews from one movie is set to be less than 150. We ignored
the neutral classes and filtered the movie reviews with
sentiment label 2. If one sentences sentiment label value  >
2, then it will be classified into positive (+). If  < 2, then it
will be classified into negative ().
Table 1 shows some examples. S-Num in Table 1 means
the number of sentences in each class.
TABLE I. EXAMPLES OF MOVIE REVIEWS AFTER FILTERING AND WORD Finally, we employed the Stanford parser to parse all
SEGMENTATION
sentences [21]. Note that all punctuations are also taken as a
Sentim
Label S-Num Example
word. As a result, we obtained Chinese Sentiment Treebank.
ent Fig.1 shows two examples in Chinese Sentiment Treebank.
(a The top one shows one positive movie review, while the down
good story worth reading) one shows one negative movie review.

4 4976 (Does it need reason for Chinese Sentiment Treebank concludes 14964 Chinese
recommending this story?) words and 13550 sentences. It allows us to better predict
(It always sentiment label of sentences based on various machine learning
brings happy for people.)
frameworks. We can train and test various models on the new
,
Positive
corpus.
.(It is a really good movie,
(+) deserving your tiers and smile.) Combination with recursive deep model proposed in this
work, we will get good performance in predicting sentiment
(When I was a label task.The details will be described in next section.
3 6463 little child, I have seen a good movie,
in which it is full of wonderful IV. RECURSIVE DEEP LEARNING
fantasy.)
In this section, we firstly introduce Recursive Neural Deep
(The picture of this Korea movie is Model (RNDM). And then we describe the details of parameter
really beautiful.) learning.
(The
movie is lack of real story about A. Recursive Neural Deep Model
every days life.)
(It is too
RNDM can compute compositional vector representations
1 1364 for phrase of any length and sentence. These representations
boring to see through.)
will then be used as features to predict sentiment label. Fig.2
Neg- (The female leading role of this shows the structure of RNDM.
ative movie is not suitable for me at all. )
() (It is For ease of exposition, we used a tri-gram ,
too bad to be called amovie) (corresponding to the best movie in English), to explain our
model.
0 747 (It is a piece of junk!)

(The story of this movie is
Label
really boring.)
+
WS
p2=g(a,p1)

W

p1=g(b,c)

a b c
-
Fig. 2. RNDM for predicting sentiment label.

In our model, each word is represented as a -dimensional

vector. All the word vectors are stacked in the word embedding
matrix  || , | | is the size of the vocabulary. The
word vectors can be seen as a parameter that is trained jointly
with the model.

When an n-gram is given to the model, it is parsed it into a

binary tree and each leaf node, corresponding to a word, is
represented as a vector. In Fig.2, node
,  and  are word

vector representations for each word respectively.

The sentiment label vector is -dimensional.    is
Fig. 1. Examples in Chinese Sentiment Treebank. the sentiment classification matrix;   is the

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transformation matrix. In our model, we omit the bias for case of using  = 
 , can be computed as  C (&) = 1
simplicity.   (&).
RNDM uses the tensor-based compositionality function  We define the full incoming error for a node H as I J,K1LL .
[22]. Its main property is that it can directly relate input vectors. For the node  , the received error is computed as formula (6).
In our example, the vector of  in Fig.2, the parent node I !",MNOO = P(  ) ( '  ' )Q $ ( ) (6)
of  and , is computed through formula (1).
Then we compute the error for the two children of  by
   formula (7).
 =     [:]   +    (1)
  

 [:]  represents the tensor that defines I !",RST = (  I !",K1LL + U) $    (7)


multiple bilinear forms.   denotes the concatenation of two We define S as formula (8).

column vectors resulting in a  vector.   is the ! ,K1LL 

transformation matrix and also the main parameter to learn. S = W5 IW " B [W] + P [W] Q  E (8)

 = 
 is a standard element-wise nonlinearity.
 , the right child of  will then take half of this vector to
After computing the first two nodes, the network is shifted compute the full I as described in formula (9).
by one position and takes as input vectors and again computes
a potential parent node. The next parent vector  in Fig.2 will I !X,K1LL = (I !",RST [1 + : 2]) (9)
!" ,RST [1
be computed as formula (2). I + : 2] means that  is the right child of Y



and hence takes the 2th half of the error. For the left child of  ,
 =     [:]   +    (2) the derivate for
, it will be I !",RST [1: ].

Note that the parent vectors must be of the same The full derivative for  is the sum of the derivatives at
dimensionality to be recursively compatible and be used as each node. We can use formula (10) to compute the full
input to the next composition. derivative for .

Then we employ the obtained vectors as inputs to a soft ;?(Z) ! ,K1LL

 ! ,K1LL 

= IW "   + IW X   (10)
classifier. For classification into classes, we compute ;@  
posterior over labels given the node and its corresponding Similarly, we use formula (11) to compute the full
sentiment node. For example, we compute the sentiment label derivative for .
of phrase in Fig.2 as described in formula (3).
;? \ ;? `" ! ,K1LL  
 !" = #$%
&(    ) (3) = + IW X    (11)
;^ [_] ;^ [_]  
 
Where   represents sentiment classification  [J]  is the H slice of the tensor; IW " and
! ,K1LL
matrix. ! ,K1LL
IW X are the a element of I !",K1LL and
!X ,K1LL
B. Backprop Through RNDM I respectively. More details about learning  can be
In this sub-section, we give a brief introduction of the way referred to [4]. For the optimization, we use AdaGrad
to train our model. Given a sentence, we aim to maximize the algorithm to find optimal solution [23].
probability of correct prediction, or minimize the cross-entropy
V. EXPERIMENTS
error between the predicted sentiment label  ' and target
sentiment label  ' . We represent words using 50-dimensional word vectors.
And we initialize all word vectors by randomly sampling each
Let * = (,   , ) be our model parameters and - a value form a uniform distribution: b(c, +c) , where c =
vector with regularization hyper parameters for all model 0.0001.
parameters. The error as a function of the PRDM parameters
for a sentence is represented as formula (4). The sentences in the Chinese Sentiment Treebank were
split into three sets: train set (including 10627 sentences),
.(*) = 013 '
45  $
'
+ -|*| 
(4) validation set (including 665 sentences) and test set (including
6 means the 6 sentence in corpus. 78% is the total 2258 sentences).
number of sentences in corpus. We use validation set and cross validation over legalization
The derivative for the weights of the sentiment of learning rate as well as the weights and minibatch size for
classification matrix  9 at sentiment node  is computed as AdaGrad algorithm.
formula (5). We compare to three commonly used baselines: Nave
Bayes (referred to NB), Maximum Entropy model (referred to
= B( '  ' ) $  C (
D)E  
;?
(5) ME) and support vector machine (referred to SVM). We
;@ A
describe the three baselines briefly in the following sub-
$ is the Hadamard product between the two vectors.  is sections.
the element-wise derivative of function , which in standard

183
A. Nave Bayes We report the overall accuracy on predicting sentiment
Nave Bayes is a simple model based on conditional label of movie reviews in test set. The RNDM obtains an
independence assumption. Given a feature vector table, the accuracy of 90.8% compared to NB (78.65%), ME (87.46%)
algorithm computes the posterior probability that the sentence and SVM (84.9%) just as shown in Fig. 3.
# belongs to one label . We use a multinomial Nave Bayes
model as described in formula (12).
92
!(L) j gh (i)
hkX !(K|L)
0f (|#) = (12) 90 NB
!() ME
88
In this formula,  represents a feature and J (#) represents 86
SVM
the count of feature  found in movie review #. There are a RNDM
84
total of % features. Parameters () and (|) are obtained
82
through maximum likelihood estimates, and smoothing
algorithm is utilized for unseen features. 80
78
We assign one movie review to the sentiment label with the
76
highest posterior probability as described in formula (13).
74
 =
c%
& 0f (|#) (13) 72
Machine Learning Methods
B. Maximum Entropy
Maximum Entropy models are feature-based models. It Fig. 3. Accuracy for predictions at sentence level.
makes no independence assumptions for its features. So we can
add features like bigrams and phrases without worrying about From Fig.3, we can see that the RNDM gets the highest
features overlapping. The model is represented by formula (14). performance in predicting positive/negative sentiment followed
mn!(h oh Kh (L,))
by ME, SVM and NB. Combination with our Chinese
? (|#, l) = (L,))
(14) Sentiment Treebank, even baseline NB and ME, despite their
Op mn!(h oh Kh
simplicity, can achieve high accuracy in predicting sentiment
In this formula, l is the sentiment label, s is the movie view, label.
and l is a weight vector. The weight vectors decide the
significance of a feature in classification. A higher weight The result highlights the fact that combination with Chinese
means that the feature is a strong indicator for the sentiment Sentiment Treebank, our model is reliable in predicting
label. sentiment label of sentences.

C. SVM E. Contrastive Conjunction

Support vector machines (SVMs) are supervised In this sub-section, we use a subset of the test set which
learning models with associated learning algorithms that includes sentences with contrastive conjunction, like X but Y
analyze data and recognize patterns, used in English. The conjunction is interpreted as an argument for
for classification and regression analysis. An SVM model is a the second conjunct, which the first functioning concussively.
representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so The contrastive conjunction structure is a difficult problem
that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a in sentiment analysis on sentence level, because the sentences
clear gap that is as wide as possible. Multiple variants of SVM first part often represents the different sentiment with the
have been developed. second part. We select the sentences with the structure X
Here we employ linear SVM due to its popularity and high ||| Y.
performance. The optimization of SVM (dual form) is to The total number of the sentences with contrastive
maximize described as formula (15). conjunction structure in test set is 60. Table 2 listed some
 movie reviews with contrastive conjunction structure X |
L(r) = TJ5 rJ J,4 rJ r4 J 4 J 4 (15)

|| Y .
Each J is real vector for feature and J is the corresponding
sentiment label J belongs. For the resulting 60 cases with contrastive conjunction
structure, RNDM obtains the highest accuracy of 95%
Subject to (for any H = 1,2  ) formula (16). compared to NB (85%), ME (85%) and SVM (86.7%) just as
rJ 0 shown in Fig.4.
s T (16)
J5 rJ J 0 From the results, we can see that the RNDM outperforms
all the three baselines by a large margin. Both NB and ME
D. Binary Sentiment achieve the same accuracy 85%, and SVM obtains accuracy
This setup is similar to other relevant work on English 86.7%. The result shows that our recursive deep model is more
corpus (original rotten tomatoes dataset), which used full reliable in predicting sentiment label of sentences with
sentence labels and binary classification of positive/negative. contrastive conjunction structure.

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 TABLE II. EXAMPLES OF MOVIE REVIEWS WITH CONTRASTIVE REFERENCES
CONJUNCTION STRUCTURE
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This work is supported by National Program on Key Basic Research Project
(973 program) under Grant:2013CB329302 and the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant No. 61175050&NO.61203281&No.61303172.

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