Papers › Self-Attention: A Better Building Block for Sentiment Analysis Neural Network Classifiers

Self-Attention: A Better Building Block for Sentiment Analysis Neural Network Classifiers

19 Dec 2018WS 2018 10arXiv:1812.07860archive 2025-07-28

Artaches Ambartsoumian, Fred Popowich

Sentiment Analysis has seen much progress in the past two decades. For the past few years, neural network approaches, primarily RNNs and CNNs, have been the most successful for this task. Recently, a new category of neural networks, self-attention networks (SANs), have been created which utilizes the attention mechanism as the basic building block. Self-attention networks have been shown to be effective for sequence modeling tasks, while having no recurrence or convolutions. In this work we explore the effectiveness of the SANs for sentiment analysis. We demonstrate that SANs are superior in performance to their RNN and CNN counterparts by comparing their classification accuracy on six datasets as well as their model characteristics such as training speed and memory consumption. Finally, we explore the effects of various SAN modifications such as multi-head attention as well as two methods of incorporating sequence position information into SANs.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

Artaches/SSAN-self-attention-sentiment-analysis-classification officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Sentiment Analysis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionSPEEDSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections