Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding

Jiaxin Huang, Yu Meng, Fang Guo, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han


Abstract
Aspect-based sentiment analysis of review texts is of great value for understanding user feedback in a fine-grained manner. It has in general two sub-tasks: (i) extracting aspects from each review, and (ii) classifying aspect-based reviews by sentiment polarity. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis, which uses only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. Existing methods are either designed only for one of the sub-tasks, or are based on topic models that may contain overlapping concepts. We propose to first learn <sentiment, aspect> joint topic embeddings in the word embedding space by imposing regularizations to encourage topic distinctiveness, and then use neural models to generalize the word-level discriminative information by pre-training the classifiers with embedding-based predictions and self-training them on unlabeled data. Our comprehensive performance analysis shows that our method generates quality joint topics and outperforms the baselines significantly (7.4% and 5.1% F1-score gain on average for aspect and sentiment classification respectively) on benchmark datasets.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.568
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6989–6999
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.568
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.568
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaxin Huang, Yu Meng, Fang Guo, Heng Ji, and Jiawei Han. 2020. Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6989–6999, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding (Huang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.568.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938965
Code
 teapot123/JASen