Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with New Target Representation and Dependency Attention

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is crucial for exploring user feedbacks and preferences on produces or services. Although numerous classical deep learning-based methods have been proposed in previous literature, several useful cues (e.g., contextual, lexical, and syntactic) are still not fully considered and utilized. In this study, a new approach for ABSA is proposed through the guidance of contextual, lexical, and syntactic cues. First, a novel sub-network is introduced to represent a target in a sentence in ABSA by considering the whole context. Second, lexicon embedding is applied to incorporate additional lexical cues. Third, a new attention module, namely, dependency attention, is proposed to elaborate syntactic dependency cues between words in attention inference. Experimental results on four benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach to aspect-based sentiment analysis.