The outcome of the experiments is very predictable. The methods that are employed are very simple and ad-hoc. I found hardly any new idea in that paper. Neither are there any significant lessons that the reader learns about embeddings or sentiment analysis. The main idea (i.e. focusing on more task-specific data for training more accurate embeddings) was already published in the context of named-entity recognition by Joshi et al. (2015). The additions made in this paper are very incremental in nature.
I find some of the experiments inconclusive as (apparently) no statistical signficance testing between different classifiers has been carried out. In Tables 2, 3 and 6, various classifier configurations produce very similar scores. In such cases, only statistical signficance testing can really give a proper indication whether these difference are meaningful. For instance, in Table 3 on the left half reporting results on RT, one may wonder whether there is a significant difference between "Wikipedia Baseline" and any of the combinations. Furthermore, one doubts whether there is any signficant difference between the different combinations (i.e. either using "subj-Wiki", "subj-Multiun" or "subj-Europarl") in that table.
The improvement by focusing on subjective subsets is plausible in general.
However, I wonder whether in real life, in particular, a situation in which resources are sparse this is very helpful. Doing a pre-selection with OpinionFinder is some pre-processing step which will not be possible in most languages other than English. There are no equivalent tools or fine-grained datasets on which such functionality could be learnt. The fact that in the experiments for Catalan, this information is not considered proves that. Minor details: - lines 329-334: The discussion of this dataset is confusing. I thought the task is plain polarity classification but the authors here also refer to "opinion holder" and "opinion targets". If these information are not relevant to the experiments carried out in this paper, then they should not be mentioned here.
- lines 431-437: The variation of "splicing" that the authors explain is not very well motivated. First, why do we need this? In how far should this be more effective than simple "appending"?
- lines 521-522: How is the subjective information isolated for these configurations? I assume the authors here again employ OpinionFinder? However, there is no explicit mention of this here.
- lines 580-588: The definitions of variables do not properly match the formula (i.e. Equation 3). I do not find n_k in Equation 3.
- lines 689-695: Similar to lines 329-334 it is unclear what precise task is carried out. Do the authors take opinion holders and targets in consideration?
***AFTER AUTHORS' RESPONSE*** Thank you very much for these clarifying remarks.
I do not follow your explanations regarding the incorporation of opinion holders and targets, though.
Overall, I will not change my scores since I think that this work lacks sufficient novelty (the things the authors raised in their response are just insufficient to me). This submission is too incremental in nature.
- lines 521-522: How is the subjective information isolated for these configurations? I assume the authors here again employ OpinionFinder? However, there is no explicit mention of this here.