  The Chinese pronunciation system offers two characteristics that distinguish
it from other languages: deep phonemic orthography and intonation variations.
We are the first to argue that these two important properties can play a major
role in Chinese sentiment analysis. Particularly, we propose two effective
features to encode phonetic information. Next, we develop a Disambiguate
Intonation for Sentiment Analysis (DISA) network using a reinforcement network.
It functions as disambiguating intonations for each Chinese character (pinyin).
Thus, a precise phonetic representation of Chinese is learned. Furthermore, we
also fuse phonetic features with textual and visual features in order to mimic
the way humans read and understand Chinese text. Experimental results on five
different Chinese sentiment analysis datasets show that the inclusion of
phonetic features significantly and consistently improves the performance of
textual and visual representations and outshines the state-of-the-art Chinese
character level representations.
