Bi-Transferring Deep Neural Networks for Domain Adaptation

Sentiment classification aims to automatically predict sentiment polarity (e.g., positive or negative) of user generated sentiment data (e.g., reviews, blogs). Due to the mismatch among different domains, a sentiment classifier trained in one domain may not work well when directly applied to other domains. Thus, domain adaptation for sentiment classification algorithms are highly desirable to reduce the domain discrepancy and manual labeling costs. To address the above challenge, we propose a novel domain adaptation method, called Bi-Transferring Deep Neural Networks (BTDNNs). The proposed BTDNNs attempts to transfer the source domain examples to the target domain, and also transfer the target domain examples to the source domain. The linear transformation of BTDNNs ensures the feasibility of transferring between domains, and the distribution consistency between the transferred domain and the desirable domain is constrained with a linear data reconstruction manner. As a result, the transferred source domain is supervised and follows similar distribution as the target domain. Therefore, any supervised method can be used on the transferred source domain to train a classifier for sentiment classification in a target domain. We conduct experiments on a benchmark composed of reviews of 4 types of Amazon products. Experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the several baseline methods, and achieves an accuracy which is competitive with the state-of-the-art method for domain adaptation.