Transferring Multi-Channel Convolutional Neural Network Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Analyzing sentiment analysis with deep learning requires massive labeled datasets where such data is not always available. The annotation process is also time-consuming and tedious. Further, even after we train the sentiment analysis, it creates another problem. Because this model is domain-dependent, the performance in another domain estimated to perform poorly. In this paper, we present the transfer learning approach to transfer knowledge gained from the source dataset into the target dataset with the expectation to improve the target model. Multichannel Convolutional Neural Network deploys different n-grams as the input channel in a single CNN model to grasp meaningful features from the text. This method has proven to perform well in sentiment analysis problems. We train our three datasets with different domains using this method as the baseline. The largest dataset then becomes the source model for transfer learning and other datasets as the target. Fine-tuning our source model also needed when retraining it into the target dataset. From the evaluation, we show that several transfer learning strategies outperform the domain-specific model, even when the data is imbalanced. We also highlight certain failing strategies that inflict lousy results on the target model performance.