  When assigning quantitative labels to a dataset, different methodologies may
rely on different scales. In particular, when assigning polarities to words in
a sentiment lexicon, annotators may use binary, categorical, or continuous
labels. Naturally, it is of interest to unify these labels from disparate
scales to both achieve maximal coverage over words and to create a single, more
robust sentiment lexicon while retaining scale coherence. We introduce a
generative model of sentiment lexica to combine disparate scales into a common
latent representation. We realize this model with a novel multi-view
variational autoencoder (VAE), called SentiVAE. We evaluate our approach via a
downstream text classification task involving nine English-Language sentiment
analysis datasets; our representation outperforms six individual sentiment
lexica, as well as a straightforward combination thereof.
