An Efficient Deep Neural Architecture for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis in Twitter

Sentiment analysis of tweets is often monolingual and the models provided by machine learning classifiers are usually not applicable across distinct languages. Cross-language sentiment classification usually relies on machine translation strategies in which a source language is translated to the desired target language. Machine translation is costly and the provided results are limited by the quality of the translation that is performed. In this paper, we propose an efficient translation-free deep neural architecture for performing multilingual sentiment analysis of tweets. Our proposed approach benefits from a cost-effective character-based embedding and from optimized convolutions to learn from multiple distinct languages. The resulting model is capable of learning latent features from all languages used during training at once and it does not require any translation process to be performed whatsoever. We empirically evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach in tweet corpora from four different languages and we show that it presents the best trade-off among four distinct state-of-the-art deep neural architectures for sentiment analysis.