Aspect Aware Learning for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) is an underexploited subtask in aspect level sentiment analysis. It aims to identify the sentiment of predefined aspect categories. The main challenge in ACSA comes from the fact that the aspect category may not occur in the sentence in most of the cases. For example, the review “ they have delicious sandwiches ” positively talks about the aspect category “ food ” in an implicit manner. In this article, we propose a novel aspect aware learning (AAL) framework for ACSA tasks. Our key idea is to exploit the interaction between the aspect category and the contents under the guidance of both sentiment polarity and predefined categories. To this end, we design a two-way memory network for integrating AAL into the framework of sentiment classification. We further present two algorithms to incorporate the potential impacts of aspect categories. One is to capture the correlations between aspect terms and the aspect category like “sandwiches” and “food.” The other is to recognize the aspect category for sentiment representations like “food” for “delicious.” We conduct extensive experiments on four SemEval datasets. The results reveal the essential role of AAL in ACSA by achieving the state-of-the-art performance.