Back to Reality: Leveraging Pattern-driven Modeling to Enable Affordable Sentiment Dependency Learning

Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (ABSC) is a challenging sub-task of traditional sentiment analysis. Due to the difficulty of handling potential correlations among sentiment polarities of multiple aspects, i.e., sentiment dependency, recent popular works tend to exploit syntactic information guiding sentiment dependency parsing. However, syntax information (e.g., syntactic dependency trees) usually occupies expensive computational resources in terms of the operation of the adjacent matrix. Instead, we define the consecutive aspects with the same sentiment as the sentiment cluster in the case that we find that most sentiment dependency occurs between adjacent aspects. Motivated by this finding, we propose the sentiment patterns (SP) to guide the model dependency learning. Thereafter, we introduce the local sentiment aggregating (LSA) mechanism to focus on learning the sentiment dependency in the sentiment cluster. The LSA is more efficient than existing dependency tree-based models due to the absence of additional dependency matrix constructing and modeling. Furthermore, we propose differential weighting for aggregation window building to measure the importance of sentiment dependency. Experiments on four public datasets show that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance with especially improvement on learning sentiment cluster.

Enhancing Fine-grained Sentiment Classification Exploiting Local Context Embedding

Target-oriented sentiment classification is a fine-grained task of natural language processing to analyze the sentiment polarity of the targets. To improve the performance of sentiment classification, many approaches proposed various attention mechanisms to capture the important context words of a target. However, previous approaches ignored the significant relatedness of a target's sentiment and its local context. This paper proposes a local context-aware network (LCA-Net), equipped with the local context embedding and local context prediction loss, to strengthen the model by emphasizing the sentiment information of the local context. The experimental results on three common datasets show that local context-aware network performs superior to existing approaches in extracting local context features. Besides, the local context-aware framework is easy to adapt to many models, with the potential to improve other target-level tasks.

A Multi-task Learning Model for Chinese-oriented Aspect Polarity Classification and Aspect Term Extraction

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task is a multi-grained task of natural language processing and consists of two subtasks: aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect polarity classification (APC). Most of the existing work focuses on the subtask of aspect term polarity inferring and ignores the significance of aspect term extraction. Besides, the existing researches do not pay attention to the research of the Chinese-oriented ABSA task. Based on the local context focus (LCF) mechanism, this paper firstly proposes a multi-task learning model for Chinese-oriented aspect-based sentiment analysis, namely LCF-ATEPC. Compared with existing models, this model equips the capability of extracting aspect term and inferring aspect term polarity synchronously, moreover, this model is effective to analyze both Chinese and English comments simultaneously and the experiment on a multilingual mixed dataset proved its availability. By integrating the domain-adapted BERT model, the LCF-ATEPC model achieved the state-of-the-art performance of aspect term extraction and aspect polarity classification in four Chinese review datasets. Besides, the experimental results on the most commonly used SemEval-2014 task4 Restaurant and Laptop datasets outperform the state-of-the-art performance on the ATE and APC subtask.