  Sentiment analysis has been emerging recently as one of the major natural
language processing (NLP) tasks in many applications. Especially, as social
media channels (e.g. social networks or forums) have become significant sources
for brands to observe user opinions about their products, this task is thus
increasingly crucial. However, when applied with real data obtained from social
media, we notice that there is a high volume of short and informal messages
posted by users on those channels. This kind of data makes the existing works
suffer from many difficulties to handle, especially ones using deep learning
approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to handle this problem. This
work is extended from our previous work, in which we proposed to combine the
typical deep learning technique of Convolutional Neural Networks with domain
knowledge. The combination is used for acquiring additional training data
augmentation and a more reasonable loss function. In this work, we further
improve our architecture by various substantial enhancements, including
negation-based data augmentation, transfer learning for word embeddings, the
combination of word-level embeddings and character-level embeddings, and using
multitask learning technique for attaching domain knowledge rules in the
learning process. Those enhancements, specifically aiming to handle short and
informal messages, help us to enjoy significant improvement in performance once
experimenting on real datasets.
