A Unified Span-Based Approach for Opinion Mining with Syntactic Constituents

Qingrong Xia, Bo Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhenghua Li, Yue Zhang, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Min Zhang


Abstract
Fine-grained opinion mining (OM) has achieved increasing attraction in the natural language processing (NLP) community, which aims to find the opinion structures of “Who expressed what opinions towards what” in one sentence. In this work, motivated by its span-based representations of opinion expressions and roles, we propose a unified span-based approach for the end-to-end OM setting. Furthermore, inspired by the unified span-based formalism of OM and constituent parsing, we explore two different methods (multi-task learning and graph convolutional neural network) to integrate syntactic constituents into the proposed model to help OM. We conduct experiments on the commonly used MPQA 2.0 dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed unified span-based approach achieves significant improvements over previous works in the exact F1 score and reduces the number of wrongly-predicted opinion expressions and roles, showing the effectiveness of our method. In addition, incorporating the syntactic constituents achieves promising improvements over the strong baseline enhanced by contextualized word representations.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.144
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1795–1804
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.144
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.144
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qingrong Xia, Bo Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhenghua Li, Yue Zhang, Fei Huang, Luo Si, and Min Zhang. 2021. A Unified Span-Based Approach for Opinion Mining with Syntactic Constituents. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1795–1804, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Unified Span-Based Approach for Opinion Mining with Syntactic Constituents (Xia et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.144.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.144.mp4
Code
 KiroSummer/opinion_mining_with_syn_cons
Data
MPQA Opinion CorpusOntoNotes 5.0