Exploring and inferring user-user pseudo-friendship for sentiment analysis with heterogeneous networks

With the development of social media and social networks, user-generated content, like forums, blogs and comments, are not only getting richer, but also ubiquitously interconnected with many other objects and entities, forming a heterogeneous information network between them. Sentiment analysis on such kinds of data can no longer ignore the information network, since it carries a lot of rich and valuable information, explicitly or implicitly, where some of them can be observed while others are not. In this paper, we propose a novel information network-based framework which can infer hidden similarity and dissimilarity between users by exploring similar and opposite opinions, so as to improve postlevel and user-level sentiment classification in the same time. More specifically, we develop a new meta path-based measure for inferring pseudo-friendship as well as dissimilarity between users, and propose a semi-supervised refining model by encoding similarity and dissimilarity from both user-level and post-level relations. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach and compare with several state-of-the-art techniques on two real-world forum datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed model with 10.5% labeled samples can achieve better performance than a traditional supervised model trained on 61.7% data samples.