Attention-Emotion-Enhanced Convolutional LSTM for Sentiment Analysis

Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks and attention mechanism have been widely used in sentiment representation learning and detection of texts. However, most of the existing deep learning models for text sentiment analysis ignore emotion's modulation effect on sentiment feature extraction, and the attention mechanisms of these deep neural network architectures are based on word- or sentence-level abstractions. Ignoring higher level abstractions may pose a negative effect on learning text sentiment features and further degrade sentiment classification performance. To address this issue, in this article, a novel model named AEC-LSTM is proposed for text sentiment detection, which aims to improve the LSTM network by integrating emotional intelligence (EI) and attention mechanism. Specifically, an emotion-enhanced LSTM, named ELSTM, is first devised by utilizing EI to improve the feature learning ability of LSTM networks, which accomplishes its emotion modulation of learning system via the proposed emotion modulator and emotion estimator. In order to better capture various structure patterns in text sequence, ELSTM is further integrated with other operations, including convolution, pooling, and concatenation. Then, topic-level attention mechanism is proposed to adaptively adjust the weight of text hidden representation. With the introduction of EI and attention mechanism, sentiment representation and classification can be more effectively achieved by utilizing sentiment semantic information hidden in text topic and context. Experiments on real-world data sets show that our approach can improve sentiment classification performance effectively and outperform state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods significantly.