Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transferring by Structural Correspondence and Space Transfer

The cross-lingual sentiment analysis (CLSA) aims to leverage label-rich resources in the source language to improve the models of a resource-scarce domain in the target language, where monolingual approaches based on machine learning usually suffer from the unavailability of sentiment knowledge. Recently, the transfer learning paradigm that can transfer sentiment knowledge from resource-rich languages, for example, English, to resource-poor languages, for example, Chinese, has gained particular interest. Along this line, in this article, we propose semisupervised learning with SCL and space transfer (ssSCL-ST), a semisupervised transfer learning approach that makes use of structural correspondence learning as well as space transfer for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. The key idea behind ssSCL-ST, at a high level, is to explore the intrinsic sentiment knowledge in the target-lingual domain and to reduce the loss of valuable knowledge due to the knowledge transfer via semisupervised learning. ssSCL-ST also features in pivot set extension and space transfer, which helps to enhance the efficiency of knowledge transfer and improve the classification accuracy in the target language domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ssSCL-ST to the state-of-the-art approaches without using any parallel corpora.