We present opinion recommendation, a novel task of jointly predicting a custom review with a rating score that a certain user would give to a certain product or service, given existing reviews and rating scores to the product or service by other users, and the reviews that the user has given to other products and services. A characteristic of opinion recommendation is the reliance of multiple data sources for multi-task joint learning, which is the strength of neural models. We use a single neural network to model users and products, capturing their correlation and generating customised product representations using a deep memory network, from which customised ratings and reviews are constructed jointly. Results show that our opinion recommendation system gives ratings that are closer to real user ratings on this http URL data compared with Yelp's own ratings, and our methods give better results compared to several pipelines baselines using state-of-the-art sentiment rating and summarization systems.
Our work also overlaps with to the area of opinion summarization, which constructs natural language summaries for multiple product reviews @cite_17 . Most previous work extracts opinion words and aspect terms. Typical approaches include association mining of frequent candidate aspects @cite_17 @cite_26 , sequence labeling based methods @cite_50 @cite_33 , as well as topic modeling techniques @cite_4 . Recently, word embeddings and recurrent neural networks are also used to extract aspect terms @cite_16 @cite_6 .
@cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_6 @cite_50 @cite_16 @cite_17
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With the rapid growth of user-generated content on the internet, automatic sentiment analysis of online customer reviews has become a hot research topic recently, but due to variety and wide range of products and services being reviewed on the internet, the supervised and domain-specific models are often not practical. As the number of reviews expands, it is essential to develop an efficient sentiment analysis model that is capable of extracting product aspects and determining the sentiments for these aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised and domain-independent model for detecting explicit and implicit aspects in reviews for sentiment analysis. In the model, first a generalized method is proposed to learn multi-word aspects and then a set of heuristic rules is employed to take into account the influence of an opinion word on detecting the aspect. Second a new metric based on mutual information and aspect frequency is proposed to score aspects with a new bootstrapping iterative algorithm. The presented bootstrapping algorithm works with an unsupervised seed set. Third, two pruning methods based on the relations between aspects in reviews are presented to remove incorrect aspects. Finally the model employs an approach which uses explicit aspects and opinion words to identify implicit aspects. Utilizing extracted polarity lexicon, the approach maps each opinion word in the lexicon to the set of pre-extracted explicit aspects with a co-occurrence metric. The proposed model was evaluated on a collection of English product review datasets. The model does not require any labeled training data and it can be easily applied to other languages or other domains such as movie reviews. Experimental results show considerable improvements of our model over conventional techniques including unsupervised and supervised approaches. In this paper, we present the first deep learning approach to aspect extraction in opinion mining. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about. We used a 7-layer deep convolutional neural network to tag each word in opinionated sentences as either aspect or non-aspect word. We also developed a set of linguistic patterns for the same purpose and combined them with the neural network. The resulting ensemble classifier, coupled with a word-embedding model for sentiment analysis, allowed our approach to obtain significantly better accuracy than state-of-the-art methods. The vast majority of existing approaches to opinion feature extraction rely on mining patterns only from a single review corpus, ignoring the nontrivial disparities in word distributional characteristics of opinion features across different corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify opinion features from online reviews by exploiting the difference in opinion feature statistics across two corpora, one domain-specific corpus (i.e., the given review corpus) and one domain-independent corpus (i.e., the contrasting corpus). We capture this disparity via a measure called domain relevance (DR), which characterizes the relevance of a term to a text collection. We first extract a list of candidate opinion features from the domain review corpus by defining a set of syntactic dependence rules. For each extracted candidate feature, we then estimate its intrinsic-domain relevance (IDR) and extrinsic-domain relevance (EDR) scores on the domain-dependent and domain-independent corpora, respectively. Candidate features that are less generic (EDR score less than a threshold) and more domain-specific (IDR score greater than another threshold) are then confirmed as opinion features. We call this interval thresholding approach the intrinsic and extrinsic domain relevance (IEDR) criterion. Experimental results on two real-world review domains show the proposed IEDR approach to outperform several other well-established methods in identifying opinion features. In this paper we present an opinion summarization technique in spoken dialogue systems. Opinion mining has been well studied for years, but very few have considered its application in spoken dialogue systems. Review summarization, when applied to real dialogue systems, is much more complicated than pure text-based summarization. We conduct a systematic study on dialogue-system-oriented review analysis and propose a three-level framework for a recommendation dialogue system. In previous work we have explored a linguistic parsing approach to phrase extraction from reviews. In this paper we will describe an approach using statistical models such as decision trees and SVMs to select the most representative phrases from the extracted phrase set. We will also explain how to generate informative yet concise review summaries for dialogue purposes. Experimental results in the restaurant domain show that the proposed approach using decision tree algorithms achieves an outperformance of 13 compared to SVM models and an improvement of 36 over a heuristic rule baseline. Experiments also show that the decision-tree-based phrase selection model can achieve rather reliable predictions on the phrase label, comparable to human judgment. The proposed statistical approach is based on domain-independent learning features and can be extended to other domains effectively. In aspect-based sentiment analysis, extracting aspect terms along with the opinions being expressed from user-generated content is one of the most important subtasks. Previous studies have shown that exploiting connections between aspect and opinion terms is promising for this task. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model that integrates recursive neural networks and conditional random fields into a unified framework for explicit aspect and opinion terms co-extraction. The proposed model learns high-level discriminative features and double propagate information between aspect and opinion terms, simultaneously. Moreover, it is flexible to incorporate hand-crafted features into the proposed model to further boost its information extraction performance. Experimental results on the SemEval Challenge 2014 dataset show the superiority of our proposed model over several baseline methods as well as the winning systems of the challenge. We propose a novel abstractive summarization system for product reviews by taking advantage of their discourse structure. First, we apply a discourse parser to each review and obtain a discourse tree representation for every review. We then modify the discourse trees such that every leaf node only contains the aspect words. Second, we aggregate the aspect discourse trees and generate a graph. We then select a subgraph representing the most important aspects and the rhetorical relations between them using a PageRank algorithm, and transform the selected subgraph into an aspect tree. Finally, we generate a natural language summary by applying a template-based NLG framework. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results, based on two user studies, show that our approach significantly outperforms extractive and abstractive baselines. One of the important types of information on the Web is the opinions expressed in the user generated content, e.g., customer reviews of products, forum posts, and blogs. In this paper, we focus on customer reviews of products. In particular, we study the problem of determining the semantic orientations (positive, negative or neutral) of opinions expressed on product features in reviews. This problem has many applications, e.g., opinion mining, summarization and search. Most existing techniques utilize a list of opinion (bearing) words (also called opinion lexicon) for the purpose. Opinion words are words that express desirable (e.g., great, amazing, etc.) or undesirable (e.g., bad, poor, etc) states. These approaches, however, all have some major shortcomings. In this paper, we propose a holistic lexicon-based approach to solving the problem by exploiting external evidences and linguistic conventions of natural language expressions. This approach allows the system to handle opinion words that are context dependent, which cause major difficulties for existing algorithms. It also deals with many special words, phrases and language constructs which have impacts on opinions based on their linguistic patterns. It also has an effective function for aggregating multiple conflicting opinion words in a sentence. A system, called Opinion Observer, based on the proposed technique has been implemented. Experimental results using a benchmark product review data set and some additional reviews show that the proposed technique is highly effective. It outperforms existing methods significantly Aspect extraction aims to extract fine-grained opinion targets from opinion texts. Recent work has shown that the syntactical approach, which employs rules about grammar dependency relations between opinion words and aspects, performs quite well. This approach is highly desirable in practice because it is unsupervised and domain independent. However, the rules need to be carefully selected and tuned manually so as not to produce too many errors. Although it is easy to evaluate the accuracy of each rule automatically, it is not easy to select a set of rules that produces the best overall result due to the overlapping coverage of the rules. In this paper, we propose a novel method to select an effective set of rules. To our knowledge, this is the first work that selects rules automatically. Our experiment results show that the proposed method can select a subset of a given rule set to achieve significantly better results than the full rule set and the existing state-of-the-art CRF-based supervised method. Given a target name, which can be a product aspect or entity, identifying its aspect words and opinion words in a given corpus is a fine-grained task in target-based sentiment analysis (TSA). This task is challenging, especially when we have no labeled data and we want to perform it for any given domain. To address it, we propose a general two-stage approach. Stage one extracts groups the target-related words (call t-words) for a given target. This is relatively easy as we can apply an existing semantics-based learning technique. Stage two separates the aspect and opinion words from the grouped t-words, which is challenging because we often do not have enough word-level aspect and opinion labels. In this work, we formulate this problem in a PU learning setting and incorporate the idea of lifelong learning to solve it. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach. Discovering and summarizing opinions from online reviews is an important and challenging task. A commonly-adopted framework generates structured review summaries with aspects and opinions. Recently topic models have been used to identify meaningful review aspects, but existing topic models do not identify aspect-specific opinion words. In this paper, we propose a MaxEnt-LDA hybrid model to jointly discover both aspects and aspect-specific opinion words. We show that with a relatively small amount of training data, our model can effectively identify aspect and opinion words simultaneously. We also demonstrate the domain adaptability of our model. Aspect-based opinion mining has attracted lots of attention today. In this paper, we address the problem of product aspect rating prediction, where we would like to extract the product aspects, and predict aspect ratings simultaneously. Topic models have been widely adapted to jointly model aspects and sentiments, but existing models may not do the prediction task well due to their weakness in sentiment extraction. The sentiment topics usually do not have clear correspondence to commonly used ratings, and the model may fail to extract certain kinds of sentiments due to skewed data. To tackle this problem, we propose a sentiment-aligned topic model(SATM), where we incorporate two types of external knowledge: productlevel overall rating distribution and wordlevel sentiment lexicon. Experiments on real dataset demonstrate that SATM is effective on product aspect rating prediction, and it achieves better performance compared to the existing approaches. In this paper we present a novel framework for extracting the ratable aspects of objects from online user reviews. Extracting such aspects is an important challenge in automatically mining product opinions from the web and in generating opinion-based summaries of user reviews [18, 19, 7, 12, 27, 36, 21]. Our models are based on extensions to standard topic modeling methods such as LDA and PLSA to induce multi-grain topics. We argue that multi-grain models are more appropriate for our task since standard models tend to produce topics that correspond to global properties of objects (e.g., the brand of a product type) rather than the aspects of an object that tend to be rated by a user. The models we present not only extract ratable aspects, but also cluster them into coherent topics, e.g., 'waitress' and 'bartender' are part of the same topic 'staff' for restaurants. This differentiates it from much of the previous work which extracts aspects through term frequency analysis with minimal clustering. We evaluate the multi-grain models both qualitatively and quantitatively to show that they improve significantly upon standard topic models. Today, more and more product reviews become available on the Internet, e.g., product review forums, discussion groups, and Blogs. However, it is almost impossible for a customer to read all of the different and possibly even contradictory opinions and make an informed decision. Therefore, mining online reviews (opinion mining) has emerged as an interesting new research direction. Extracting aspects and the corresponding ratings is an important challenge in opinion mining. An aspect is an attribute or component of a product, e.g. 'screen' for a digital camera. It is common that reviewers use different words to describe an aspect (e.g. 'LCD', 'display', 'screen'). A rating is an intended interpretation of the user satisfaction in terms of numerical values. Reviewers usually express the rating of an aspect by a set of sentiments, e.g. 'blurry screen'. In this paper we present three probabilistic graphical models which aim to extract aspects and corresponding ratings of products from online reviews. The first two models extend standard PLSI and LDA to generate a rated aspect summary of product reviews. As our main contribution, we introduce Interdependent Latent Dirichlet Allocation (ILDA) model. This model is more natural for our task since the underlying probabilistic assumptions (interdependency between aspects and ratings) are appropriate for our problem domain. We conduct experiments on a real life dataset, Epinions.com, demonstrating the improved effectiveness of the ILDA model in terms of the likelihood of a held-out test set, and the accuracy of aspects and aspect ratings. This paper describes our system submitted to Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis Task 5 of SemEval-2016. Our system consists of two components: binary classifiers trained using single layer feedforward network for aspect category classification (Slot 1), and sequential labeling classifiers for opinion target extraction (Slot 2). Besides extracting a variety of lexicon features, syntactic features, and cluster features, we explore the use of deep learning systems to provide additional neural network features. Our system achieves the best performances on the English datasets, ranking 1st for four evaluations (Slot 1 for both restaurant and laptop domains, Slot 2, and Slot 1 & 2). The tasks in fine-grained opinion mining can be regarded as either a token-level sequence labeling problem or as a semantic compositional task. We propose a general class of discriminative models based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and word embeddings that can be successfully applied to such tasks without any taskspecific feature engineering effort. Our experimental results on the task of opinion target identification show that RNNs, without using any hand-crafted features, outperform feature-rich CRF-based models. Our framework is flexible, allows us to incorporate other linguistic features, and achieves results that rival the top performing systems in SemEval-2014. The web contains a wealth of product reviews, but sifting through them is a daunting task. Ideally, an opinion mining tool would process a set of search results for a given item, generating a list of product attributes (quality, features, etc.) and aggregating opinions about each of them (poor, mixed, good). We begin by identifying the unique properties of this problem and develop a method for automatically distinguishing between positive and negative reviews. Our classifier draws on information retrieval techniques for feature extraction and scoring, and the results for various metrics and heuristics vary depending on the testing situation. The best methods work as well as or better than traditional machine learning. When operating on individual sentences collected from web searches, performance is limited due to noise and ambiguity. But in the context of a complete web-based tool and aided by a simple method for grouping sentences into attributes, the results are qualitatively quite useful. This paper presents a pilot study of opinion summarization on conversations. We create a corpus containing extractive and abstractive summaries of speaker's opinion towards a given topic using 88 telephone conversations. We adopt two methods to perform extractive summarization. The first one is a sentence-ranking method that linearly combines scores measured from different aspects including topic relevance, subjectivity, and sentence importance. The second one is a graph-based method, which incorporates topic and sentiment information, as well as additional information about sentence-to-sentence relations extracted based on dialogue structure. Our evaluation results show that both methods significantly outperform the baseline approach that extracts the longest utterances. In particular, we find that incorporating dialogue structure in the graph-based method contributes to the improved system performance. We consider the problem of 1 identifying product features and opinion words in a unified process from Chinese customer reviews when only a much small seed set of opinion words is available. In particular, we consider a problem setting motivated by the task of identifying product features with opinion words and learning opinion words through features alternately and iteratively. In customer reviews, opinion words usually have a close relationship with product features, and the association between them is measured by a revised formula of mutual information in this paper. A bootstrapping iterative learning strategy is proposed to alternately both of them. A linguistic rule is adopted to identify lowfrequent features and opinion words. Furthermore, a mapping function from opinion words to features is proposed to identify implicit features in sentence. Empirical results on three kinds of product reviews indicate the effectiveness of our method. In many decision-making scenarios, people can benefit from knowing what other people's opinions are. As more and more evaluative documents are posted on the Web, summarizing these useful resources becomes a critical task for many organizations and individuals. This paper presents a framework for summarizing a corpus of evaluative documents about a single entity by a natural language summary. We propose two summarizers: an extractive summarizer and an abstractive one. As an additional contribution, we show how our abstractive summarizer can be modified to generate summaries tailored to a model of the user preferences that is solidly grounded in decision theory and can be effectively elicited from users. We have tested our framework in three user studies. In the first one, we compared the two summarizers. They performed equally well relative to each other quantitatively, while significantly outperforming a baseline standard approach to multidocument summarization. Trends in the results as well as qualitative comments from participants suggest that the summarizers have different strengths and weaknesses. After this initial user study, we realized that the diversity of opinions expressed in the corpus (i.e., its controversiality) might play a critical role in comparing abstraction versus extraction. To clearly pinpoint the role of controversiality, we ran a second user study in which we controlled for the degree of controversiality of the corpora that were summarized for the participants. The outcome of this study indicates that for evaluative text abstraction tends to be more effective than extraction, particularly when the corpus is controversial. In the third user study we assessed the effectiveness of our user tailoring strategy. The results of this experiment confirm that user tailored summaries are more informative than untailored ones. Mining detailed opinions buried in the vast amount of review text data is an important, yet quite challenging task with widespread applications in multiple domains. Latent Aspect Rating Analysis (LARA) refers to the task of inferring both opinion ratings on topical aspects (e.g., location, service of a hotel) and the relative weights reviewers have placed on each aspect based on review content and the associated overall ratings. A major limitation of previous work on LARA is the assumption of pre-specified aspects by keywords. However, the aspect information is not always available, and it may be difficult to pre-define appropriate aspects without a good knowledge about what aspects are actually commented on in the reviews. In this paper, we propose a unified generative model for LARA, which does not need pre-specified aspect keywords and simultaneously mines 1) latent topical aspects, 2) ratings on each identified aspect, and 3) weights placed on different aspects by a reviewer. Experiment results on two different review data sets demonstrate that the proposed model can effectively perform the Latent Aspect Rating Analysis task without the supervision of aspect keywords. Because of its generality, the proposed model can be applied to explore all kinds of opinionated text data containing overall sentiment judgments and support a wide range of interesting application tasks, such as aspect-based opinion summarization, personalized entity ranking and recommendation, and reviewer behavior analysis.