Adversarial Category Alignment Network for Cross-domain Sentiment Classification

Cross-domain sentiment classification aims to predict sentiment polarity on a target domain utilizing a classifier learned from a source domain. Most existing adversarial learning methods focus on aligning the global marginal distribution by fooling a domain discriminator, without taking category-specific decision boundaries into consideration, which can lead to the mismatch of category-level features. In this work, we propose an adversarial category alignment network (ACAN), which attempts to enhance category consistency between the source domain and the target domain. Specifically, we increase the discrepancy of two polarity classifiers to provide diverse views, locating ambiguous features near the decision boundaries. Then the generator learns to create better features away from the category boundaries by minimizing this discrepancy. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance and produce more discriminative features.