Improving Domain-Adapted Sentiment Classification by Deep Adversarial Mutual Learning

Domain-adapted sentiment classification refers to training on a labeled source domain to well infer document-level sentiment on an unlabeled target domain. Most existing relevant models involve a feature extractor and a sentiment classifier, where the feature extractor works towards learning domain-invariant features from both domains, and the sentiment classifier is trained only on the source domain to guide the feature extractor. As such, they lack a mechanism to use sentiment polarity lying in the target domain. To improve domain-adapted sentiment classification by learning sentiment from the target domain as well, we devise a novel deep adversarial mutual learning approach involving two groups of feature extractors, domain discriminators, sentiment classifiers, and label probers. The domain discriminators enable the feature extractors to obtain domain-invariant features. Meanwhile, the label prober in each group explores document sentiment polarity of the target domain through the sentiment prediction generated by the classifier in the peer group, and guides the learning of the feature extractor in its own group. The proposed approach achieves the mutual learning of the two groups in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on multiple public datasets indicate our method obtains the state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of mutual learning through label probers.