Are Your Comments Positive? A Self-Distillation Contrastive Learning Method for Analyzing Online Public Opinion

Abstract

With the popularity of social media, online opinion analysis is becoming more and more widely and deeply used in management studies. Automatically recognizing the sentiment of user reviews is a crucial tool for opinion analysis research. However, previous studies mainly have focused on specific scenarios or algorithms that cannot be directly applied to real-world opinion analysis. To address this issue, we collect a new dataset of user reviews from multiple real-world scenarios such as e-retail, e-commerce, movie reviews, and social media. Due to the heterogeneity and complexity of this multi-scenario review data, we propose a self-distillation contrastive learning method. Specifically, we utilize two EMA (exponential moving average) models to generate soft labels as additional supervision. Additionally, we introduce the prototypical supervised contrastive learning module to reduce the variability of data in different scenarios by pulling in representations of the same class. Our method has proven to be extremely competitive, outperforming other advanced methods. Specifically, our method achieves an 87.44% F1 score, exceeding the performance of current advanced methods by 1.07%. Experimental results, including examples and visualization analysis, further demonstrate the superiority of our method.