Modeling Social Norms Evolution for Personalized Sentiment Classification

Abstract

Motivated by the findings in social science that people’s opinions are diverse and variable while together they are shaped by evolving social norms, we perform personalized sentiment classification via shared model adaptation over time. In our proposed solution, a global sentiment model is constantly updated to capture the homogeneity in which users express opinions, while personalized models are simultaneously adapted from the global model to recognize the heterogeneity of opinions from individuals. Global model sharing alleviates data sparsity issue, and individualized model adaptation enables ef-ficient online model learning. Extensive experimentations are performed on two large review collections from Amazon and Yelp, and encouraging performance gain is achieved against several state-of-the-art transfer learning and multi-task learning based sentiment classification solutions.