In this paper we investigate the use of latent variable structured prediction models for fine-grained sentiment analysis in the common situation where only coarse-grained supervision is available. Specifically, we show how sentence-level sentiment labels can be effectively learned from document-level supervision using hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs). Experiments show that this technique reduces sentence classification errors by 22% relative to using a lexicon and 13% relative to machine-learning baselines.
We derive two variants of a semi-supervised model for fine-grained sentiment analysis. Both models leverage abundant natural supervision in the form of review ratings, as well as a small amount of manually crafted sentence labels, to learn sentence-level sentiment classifiers. The proposed model is a fusion of a fully supervised structured conditional model and its partially supervised counterpart. This allows for highly efficient estimation and inference algorithms with rich feature definitions. We describe the two variants as well as their component models and verify experimentally that both variants give significantly improved results for sentence-level sentiment analysis compared to all baselines.