No Arabic abstract
Aspect sentiment classification (ASC) aims at determining sentiments expressed towards different aspects in a sentence. While state-of-the-art ASC models have achieved remarkable performance, they are recently shown to suffer from the issue of robustness. Particularly in two common scenarios: when domains of test and training data are different (out-of-domain scenario) or test data is adversarially perturbed (adversarial scenario), ASC models may attend to irrelevant words and neglect opinion expressions that truly describe diverse aspects. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we hypothesize that position bias (i.e., the words closer to a concerning aspect would carry a higher degree of importance) is crucial for building more robust ASC models by reducing the probability of mis-attending. Accordingly, we propose two mechanisms for capturing position bias, namely position-biased weight and position-biased dropout, which can be flexibly injected into existing models to enhance representations for classification. Experiments conducted on out-of-domain and adversarial datasets demonstrate that our proposed approaches largely improve the robustness and effectiveness of current models.
Attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have proven to be useful in aspect-level sentiment classification. However, due to the difficulties in annotating aspect-level data, existing public datasets for this task are all relatively small, which largely limits the effectiveness of those neural models. In this paper, we explore two approaches that transfer knowledge from document- level data, which is much less expensive to obtain, to improve the performance of aspect-level sentiment classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches on 4 public datasets from SemEval 2014, 2015, and 2016, and we show that attention-based LSTM benefits from document-level knowledge in multiple ways.
Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) aims at identifying the sentiment polarity of a specified aspect in a sentence. ALSC is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the aspect. To address this problem, recent works fine-tune pre-trained Transformer encoders for ALSC to extract an aspect-centric dependency tree that can locate the opinion words. However, the induced opinion words only provide an intuitive cue far below human-level interpretability. Besides, the pre-trained encoder tends to internalize an aspects intrinsic sentiment, causing sentiment bias and thus affecting model performance. In this paper, we propose a span-based anti-bias aspect representation learning framework. It first eliminates the sentiment bias in the aspect embedding by adversarial learning against aspects prior sentiment. Then, it aligns the distilled opinion candidates with the aspect by span-based dependency modeling to highlight the interpretable opinion terms. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, with the capability of unsupervised opinion extraction.
Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA), exploring sentim- ent polarity of aspect-given sentence, has drawn widespread applications in social media and public opinion. Previously researches typically derive aspect-independent representation by sentence feature generation only depending on text data. In this paper, we propose a Position-Guided Contributive Distribution (PGCD) unit. It achieves a position-dependent contributive pattern and generates aspect-related statement feature for ABSA task. Quoted from Shapley Value, PGCD can gain position-guided contextual contribution and enhance the aspect-based representation. Furthermore, the unit can be used for improving effects on multimodal ABSA task, whose datasets restructured by ourselves. Extensive experiments on both text and text-audio level using dataset (SemEval) show that by applying the proposed unit, the mainstream models advance performance in accuracy and F1 score.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in online reviews. Most recent efforts adopt attention-based neural network models to implicitly connect aspects with opinion words. However, due to the complexity of language and the existence of multiple aspects in a single sentence, these models often confuse the connections. In this paper, we address this problem by means of effective encoding of syntax information. Firstly, we define a unified aspect-oriented dependency tree structure rooted at a target aspect by reshaping and pruning an ordinary dependency parse tree. Then, we propose a relational graph attention network (R-GAT) to encode the new tree structure for sentiment prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted on the SemEval 2014 and Twitter datasets, and the experimental results confirm that the connections between aspects and opinion words can be better established with our approach, and the performance of the graph attention network (GAT) is significantly improved as a consequence.