A Case Study and Qualitative Analysis of Simple Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining
Gerhard Hagerer, Wing Sheung Leung, Qiaoxi Liu, Hannah Danner, Georg Groh
User-generated content from social media is produced in many languages,
making it technically challenging to compare the discussed themes from one
domain across different cultures and regions. It is relevant for domains in a
globalized world, such as market research, where people from two nations and
markets might have different requirements for a product. We propose a simple,
modern, and effective method for building a single topic model with sentiment
analysis capable of covering multiple languages simultanteously, based on a
pre-trained state-of-the-art deep neural network for natural language
understanding. To demonstrate its feasibility, we apply the model to newspaper
articles and user comments of a specific domain, i.e., organic food products
and related consumption behavior. The themes match across languages.
Additionally, we obtain an high proportion of stable and domain-relevant
topics, a meaningful relation between topics and their respective textual
contents, and an interpretable representation for social media documents.
Marketing can potentially benefit from our method, since it provides an
easy-to-use means of addressing specific customer interests from different
market regions around the globe. For reproducibility, we provide the code,
data, and results of our study.