ACNN-TL: attention-based convolutional neural network coupling with transfer learning and contextualized word representation for enhancing the performance of sentiment classification.

Due to the rapid growth of textual information on the web, analyzing users' opinions about particular products, events or services is now considered a crucial and challenging task that has changed sentiment analysis from an academic endeavor to an essential analytic tool in cognitive science and natural language understanding. Despite the remarkable success of deep learning models for textual sentiment classification, they are still confronted with some limitations. Convolutional neural network is one of the deep learning models that has been excelled at sentiment classification but tends to need a large amount of training data while it considers that all words in a sentence have equal contribution in the polarity of a sentence and its performance is highly dependent on its accompanying hyper-parameters. To overcome these issues, an Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network with Transfer Learning (ACNN-TL) is proposed in this paper that not only tries to take advantage of both attention mechanism and transfer learning to boost the performance of sentiment classification but also language models, namely Word2Vec and BERT, are used as its the backbone to better express sentence semantics as word vector. We conducted our experiment on widely-studied sentiment classification datasets and according to the empirical results, not only the proposed ACNN-TL achieved comparable or even better classification results but also employing contextual representation and transfer learning yielded remarkable improvement in the classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]