Sentiment classification

A popular task in NLP is sentiment classification: based on the content of a text snippet, identify the sentiment expressed therein. Practical applications include analysis of reviews, survey responses, social media comments, or healthcare materials.

We will train our network on the Sentiment140 dataset introduced in https://www-cs.stanford.edu/people/alecmgo/papers/TwitterDistantSupervision09.pdf, which contains 1.6 million tweets annotated with three classes: negative, neutral, and positive. In order to avoid issues with locale, we standardize the encoding (this part is best done from the console level and not inside the notebook). The logic is the following: the original dataset contains raw text that—by its very nature—can contain non-standard characters (such as emojis, which are obviously common in social media communication). We want to convert the text to UTF8—the de facto standard for NLP in English. The fastest way to do...