Microblog sentiment analysis via embedding social contexts into an attentive LSTM

Abstract With the rise of microblogging services like Twitter and Sina Weibo, users are able to post various contents on breaking news, public events, or products conveniently and swiftly. These massive contents carry users’ mass sentiment and opinions on various topics, which are a kind of useful and timely source. Traditional microblog sentiment analysis methods often assume that microblogs are independent and identically distributed, they ignore the fact that the microblogs are networked data. Although some methods take the relations between microblogs into consideration, they only use shallow network features which are not sufficient, such as neighbors. Besides, these methods are content-based methods because they cannot use social context information in the prediction stage. To solve this problem, in this paper we use a deep learning method to fully capture the features of microblog relations including both the implicit and explicit ones and use these features to promote microblog sentiment analysis results. Specifically, we first construct a graph which models the relations between microblogs inspired by sentiment consistency and emotional contagion theories. Then we embed the microblog graph and get a continuous vector representation for social contexts of each microblog. After that, we propose a novel neural network to integrate social context knowledge with text information. To handle the problem that different words have different contributions to the classification result, we introduce the attention mechanism into our model. We conduct experiments on three publicly released datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed model can outperform state-of-the-art methods consistently and significantly.