We introduce a deep memory network for aspect level sentiment classification. Unlike feature-based SVM and sequential neural models such as LSTM, this approach explicitly captures the importance of each context word when inferring the sentiment polarity of an aspect. Such importance degree and text representation are calculated with multiple computational layers, each of which is a neural attention model over an external memory. Experiments on laptop and restaurant datasets demonstrate that our approach performs comparable to state-of-art feature based SVM system, and substantially better than LSTM and attention-based LSTM architectures. On both datasets we show that multiple computational layers could improve the performance. Moreover, our approach is also fast. The deep memory network with 9 layers is 15 times faster than LSTM with a CPU implementation.
Aspect level sentiment classification is a fine-grained classification task in sentiment analysis, which aims at identifying the sentiment polarity of a sentence expressed towards an aspect @cite_7 . Most existing works use machine learning algorithms, and build sentiment classifier from sentences with manually annotated polarity labels. One of the most successful approaches in literature is feature based SVM. Experts could design effective feature templates and make use of external resources like parser and sentiment lexicons @cite_28 @cite_10 . In recent years, neural network approaches @cite_22 @cite_0 @cite_32 @cite_4 are of growing attention for their capacity to learn powerful text representation from data. However, these neural models (e.g. LSTM) are computationally expensive, and could not explicitly reveal the importance of context evidences with regard to an aspect. Instead, we develop simple and fast approach that explicitly encodes the context importance towards a given aspect. It is worth noting that the task we focus on differs from fine-grained opinion extraction, which assigns each word a tag (e.g. B,I,O) to indicate whether it is an aspect sentiment word @cite_27 @cite_18 @cite_34 . The aspect word in this work is given as a part of the input.
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_0 @cite_27 @cite_34 @cite_10
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Aspect-level sentiment classification is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which aims to predict the sentiment of a text in different aspects. One key point of this task is to allocate the appropriate sentiment words for the given aspect.Recent work exploits attention neural networks to allocate sentiment words and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. However, the prior work only attends to the sentiment information and ignores the aspect-related information in the text, which may cause mismatching between the sentiment words and the aspects when an unrelated sentiment word is semantically meaningful for the given aspect. To solve this problem, we propose a HiErarchical ATtention (HEAT) network for aspect-level sentiment classification. The HEAT network contains a hierarchical attention module, consisting of aspect attention and sentiment attention. The aspect attention extracts the aspect-related information to guide the sentiment attention to better allocate aspect-specific sentiment words of the text. Moreover, the HEAT network supports to extract the aspect terms together with aspect-level sentiment classification by introducing the Bernoulli attention mechanism. To verify the proposed method, we conduct experiments on restaurant and laptop review data sets from SemEval at both the sentence level and the review level. The experimental results show that our model better allocates appropriate sentiment expressions for a given aspect benefiting from the guidance of aspect terms. Moreover, our method achieves better performance on aspect-level sentiment classification than state-of-the-art models. Abstract Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims at identifying sentiment polarity towards aspect targets in a sentence. Previously, the task was modeled as a sentence-level sentiment classification problem that treated aspect targets as a hint. Such approaches oversimplify the problem by averaging word embeddings when the aspect target is a multi-word sequence. In this paper, we formalize the problem from a different perspective, i.e., that sentiment at aspect target level should be the main focus. Due to the fact that written Chinese is very rich and complex, Chinese aspect targets can be studied at three different levels of granularity: radical, character and word. Thus, we propose to explicitly model the aspect target and conduct sentiment classification directly at the aspect target level via three granularities. Moreover, we study two fusion methods for such granularities in the task of Chinese aspect-level sentiment analysis. Experimental results on a multi-word aspect target subset from SemEval2014 and four Chinese review datasets validate our claims and show the improved performance of our model over the state of the art. This paper describes our submissions to the Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis task of SemEval-2016. For Aspect Category Detection (Subtask1 Slot1), we used multiple ensembles, based on Support Vector Machine classifiers. For Opinion Target Expression extraction (Subtask1 Slot2), we used a sequence labeling approach with Conditional Random Fields. For Polarity Detection (Subtask1 Slot3), we used an ensemble of two supervised classifiers, one based on hand crafted features and one based on word embeddings. Our systems were ranked in the top 6 positions in all the tasks we participated. The source code of our systems is publicly available. Sentiment analysis concerns about automatically identifying sentiment or opinion expressed in a given piece of text. Most prior work either use prior lexical knowledge defined as sentiment polarity of words or view the task as a text classification problem and rely on labeled corpora to train a sentiment classifier. While lexicon-based approaches do not adapt well to different domains, corpus-based approaches require expensive manual annotation effort. In this paper, we propose a novel framework where an initial classifier is learned by incorporating prior information extracted from an existing sentiment lexicon with preferences on expectations of sentiment labels of those lexicon words being expressed using generalized expectation criteria. Documents classified with high confidence are then used as pseudo-labeled examples for automatical domain-specific feature acquisition. The word-class distributions of such self-learned features are estimated from the pseudo-labeled examples and are used to train another classifier by constraining the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. Experiments on both the movie-review data and the multi-domain sentiment dataset show that our approach attains comparable or better performance than existing weakly-supervised sentiment classification methods despite using no labeled documents.