Regrexit or not Regrexit: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Polarized Contexts

Vorakit Vorakitphan, Marco Guerini, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata


Abstract
Emotion analysis in polarized contexts represents a challenge for Natural Language Processing modeling. As a step in the aforementioned direction, we present a methodology to extend the task of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) toward the affect and emotion representation in polarized settings. In particular, we adopt the three-dimensional model of affect based on Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD). We then present a Brexit scenario that proves how affect varies toward the same aspect when politically polarized stances are presented. Our approach captures aspect-based polarization from newspapers regarding the Brexit scenario of 1.2m entities at sentence-level. We demonstrate how basic constituents of emotions can be mapped to the VAD model, along with their interactions respecting the polarized context in ABSA settings using biased key-concepts (e.g., “stop Brexit” vs. “support Brexit”). Quite intriguingly, the framework achieves to produce coherent aspect evidences of Brexit’s stance from key-concepts, showing that VAD influence the support and opposition aspects.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
219–224
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vorakit Vorakitphan, Marco Guerini, Elena Cabrio, and Serena Villata. 2020. Regrexit or not Regrexit: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Polarized Contexts. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 219–224, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Regrexit or not Regrexit: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Polarized Contexts (Vorakitphan et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.19.pdf