We seek to explain the causes of the misclassification of the most challenging documents, namely those that no classifier using state-of-the-art, very semantically-separable contextual embedding representations managed to predict accurately. To do so, we propose a taxonomy of incorrect predictions, which we used to perform qualitative human evaluation. We posed two (research) questions, considering three sentiment datasets in two different domains – movie and product reviews. Evaluators with two different backgrounds evaluated documents by comparing the predominant sentiment assigned by the model to the label in the gold dataset in order to decide on a likely misclassification reason. Based on a high inter-evaluator agreement (81.7%), we observed significant differences between the product and movie review domains, such as the prevalence of ambivalence in product reviews and sarcasm in movie reviews. Our analysis also revealed an unexpectedly high rate of incorrect labeling in the gold dataset (up to 33%) and a significant amount of incorrect prediction by the model due to a series of linguistic phenomena (including amplified words, contrastive markers, comparative sentences, and references to world knowledge). Overall, our taxonomy and methodology allow us to explain between 80%-85% of the errors with high confidence (agreement) – enabling us to point out where future efforts to improve models should be concentrated.

In this paper, we describe our participation in two tasks organized by WOSP 2020, consisting of classifying the context of a citation (e.g., background, motivational, extension) and whether a citation is influential in the work (or not). Classifying the context of an article citation or its influence/importance in an automated way presents a challenge for machine learning algorithms due to the shortage of information and inherently ambiguity of the task. Its solution, on the other hand, may allow enhanced bibliometric studies. Several text representations have already been proposed in the literature, but their combination has been underexploited in the two tasks described above. Our solution relies exactly on combining different, potentially complementary, text representations in order to enhance the final obtained results. We evaluate the combination of various strategies for text representation, achieving the best results with a combination of TF-IDF (capturing statistical information), LDA (capturing topical information) and Glove word embeddings (capturing contextual information) for the task of classifying the context of the citation. Our solution ranked first in the task of classifying the citation context and third in classifying its influence.