Text Emotion Distribution Learning from Small Sample: A Meta-Learning Approach

Zhenjie Zhao, Xiaojuan Ma


Abstract
Text emotion distribution learning (EDL) aims to develop models that can predict the intensity values of a sentence across a set of emotion categories. Existing methods based on supervised learning require a large amount of well-labelled training data, which is difficult to obtain due to inconsistent perception of fine-grained emotion intensity. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning approach to learn text emotion distributions from a small sample. Specifically, we propose to learn low-rank sentence embeddings by tensor decomposition to capture their contextual semantic similarity, and use K-nearest neighbors (KNNs) of each sentence in the embedding space to generate sample clusters. We then train a meta-learner that can adapt to new data with only a few training samples on the clusters, and further fit the meta-learner on KNNs of a testing sample for EDL. In this way, we effectively augment the learning ability of a model on the small sample. To demonstrate the performance, we compare the proposed approach with state-of-the-art EDL methods on a widely used EDL dataset: SemEval 2007 Task 14 (Strapparava and Mihalcea, 2007). Results show the superiority of our method on small-sample emotion distribution learning.
Anthology ID:
D19-1408
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3957–3967
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenjie Zhao and Xiaojuan Ma. 2019. Text Emotion Distribution Learning from Small Sample: A Meta-Learning Approach. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3957–3967, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text Emotion Distribution Learning from Small Sample: A Meta-Learning Approach (Zhao & Ma, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1408.pdf