Adversarial Capsule Networks for Romanian Satire Detection and Sentiment Analysis

Satire detection and sentiment analysis are intensively explored natural language processing (NLP) tasks that study the identification of the satirical tone from texts and extracting sentiments in relationship with their targets. In languages with fewer research resources, an alternative is to produce artificial examples based on character-level adversarial processes to overcome dataset size limitations. Such samples are proven to act as a regularization method, thus improving the robustness of models. In this work, we improve the well-known NLP models (i.e., Convolutional Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), and Bidirectional GRUs) with adversarial training and capsule networks. The fine-tuned models are used for satire detection and sentiment analysis tasks in the Romanian language. The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods for the two tasks, achieving up to 99.08% accuracy, thus confirming the improvements added by the capsule layers and the adversarial training in NLP approaches.