No Arabic abstract
Existing works for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) have adopted a unified approach, which allows the interactive relations among subtasks. However, we observe that these methods tend to predict polarities based on the literal meaning of aspect and opinion terms and mainly consider relations implicitly among subtasks at the word level. In addition, identifying multiple aspect-opinion pairs with their polarities is much more challenging. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of contextual information w.r.t. the aspect and opinion are further required in ABSA. In this paper, we propose Deep Contextualized Relation-Aware Network (DCRAN), which allows interactive relations among subtasks with deep contextual information based on two modules (i.e., Aspect and Opinion Propagation and Explicit Self-Supervised Strategies). Especially, we design novel self-supervised strategies for ABSA, which have strengths in dealing with multiple aspects. Experimental results show that DCRAN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins on three widely used benchmarks.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict fine-grained sentiments of comments with respect to given aspect terms or categories. In previous ABSA methods, the importance of aspect has been realized and verified. Most existing LSTM-based models take aspect into account via the attention mechanism, where the attention weights are calculated after the context is modeled in the form of contextual vectors. However, aspect-related information may be already discarded and aspect-irrelevant information may be retained in classic LSTM cells in the context modeling process, which can be improved to generate more effective context representations. This paper proposes a novel variant of LSTM, termed as aspect-aware LSTM (AA-LSTM), which incorporates aspect information into LSTM cells in the context modeling stage before the attention mechanism. Therefore, our AA-LSTM can dynamically produce aspect-aware contextual representations. We experiment with several representative LSTM-based models by replacing the classic LSTM cells with the AA-LSTM cells. Experimental results on SemEval-2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AA-LSTM.
Recent neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis approaches, though achieving promising improvement on benchmark datasets, have reported suffering from poor robustness when encountering confounder such as non-target aspects. In this paper, we take a causal view to addressing this issue. We propose a simple yet effective method, namely, Sentiment Adjustment (SENTA), by applying a backdoor adjustment to disentangle those confounding factors. Experimental results on the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS) dataset demonstrate that our approach improves the performance while maintaining accuracy in the original test set.
Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the sentiment polarity towards the given aspect in a sentence, while previous models typically exploit an aspect-independent (weakly associative) encoder for sentence representation generation. In this paper, we propose a novel Aspect-Guided Deep Transition model, named AGDT, which utilizes the given aspect to guide the sentence encoding from scratch with the specially-designed deep transition architecture. Furthermore, an aspect-oriented objective is designed to enforce AGDT to reconstruct the given aspect with the generated sentence representation. In doing so, our AGDT can accurately generate aspect-specific sentence representation, and thus conduct more accurate sentiment predictions. Experimental results on multiple SemEval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which significantly outperforms the best reported results with the same setting.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment expressed in a review with respect to a given aspect. The core of ABSA is to model the interaction between the context and given aspect to extract the aspect-related information. In prior work, attention mechanisms and dependency graph networks are commonly adopted to capture the relations between the context and given aspect. And the weighted sum of context hidden states is used as the final representation fed to the classifier. However, the information related to the given aspect may be already discarded and adverse information may be retained in the context modeling processes of existing models. This problem cannot be solved by subsequent modules and there are two reasons: first, their operations are conducted on the encoder-generated context hidden states, whose value cannot change after the encoder; second, existing encoders only consider the context while not the given aspect. To address this problem, we argue the given aspect should be considered as a new clue out of context in the context modeling process. As for solutions, we design several aspect-aware context encoders based on different backbones: an aspect-aware LSTM and three aspect-aware BERTs. They are dedicated to generate aspect-aware hidden states which are tailored for ABSA task. In these aspect-aware context encoders, the semantics of the given aspect is used to regulate the information flow. Consequently, the aspect-related information can be retained and aspect-irrelevant information can be excluded in the generated hidden states. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets with empirical analysis, demonstrating the efficacies and advantages of our proposed aspect-aware context encoders.
Aspect based sentiment analysis, predicting sentiment polarity of given aspects, has drawn extensive attention. Previous attention-based models emphasize using aspect semantics to help extract opinion features for classification. However, these works are either not able to capture opinion spans as a whole, or not able to capture variable-length opinion spans. In this paper, we present a neat and effective structured attention model by aggregating multiple linear-chain CRFs. Such a design allows the model to extract aspect-specific opinion spans and then evaluate sentiment polarity by exploiting the extracted opinion features. The experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, and our analysis demonstrates that our model can capture aspect-specific opinion spans.