The Sentimental Value of Chinese Sub-Character Components

Yassine Benajiba, Or Biran, Zhiliang Weng, Yong Zhang, Jin Sun


Abstract
Sub-character components of Chinese characters carry important semantic information, and recent studies have shown that utilizing this information can improve performance on core semantic tasks. In this paper, we hypothesize that in addition to semantic information, sub-character components may also carry emotional information, and that utilizing it should improve performance on sentiment analysis tasks. We conduct a series of experiments on four Chinese sentiment data sets and show that we can significantly improve the performance in various tasks over that of a character-level embeddings baseline. We then focus on qualitatively assessing multiple examples and trying to explain how the sub-character components affect the results in each case.
Anthology ID:
W17-6003
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2017
Address:
Taiwan
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Zhifang Sui
Venue:
SIGHAN
SIG:
SIGHAN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21–29
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-6003
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yassine Benajiba, Or Biran, Zhiliang Weng, Yong Zhang, and Jin Sun. 2017. The Sentimental Value of Chinese Sub-Character Components. In Proceedings of the 9th SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, pages 21–29, Taiwan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Sentimental Value of Chinese Sub-Character Components (Benajiba et al., SIGHAN 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-6003.pdf