Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Type-aware Graph Convolutional Networks and Layer Ensemble

Yuanhe Tian, Guimin Chen, Yan Song


Abstract
It is popular that neural graph-based models are applied in existing aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) studies for utilizing word relations through dependency parses to facilitate the task with better semantic guidance for analyzing context and aspect words. However, most of these studies only leverage dependency relations without considering their dependency types, and are limited in lacking efficient mechanisms to distinguish the important relations as well as learn from different layers of graph based models. To address such limitations, in this paper, we propose an approach to explicitly utilize dependency types for ABSA with type-aware graph convolutional networks (T-GCN), where attention is used in T-GCN to distinguish different edges (relations) in the graph and attentive layer ensemble is proposed to comprehensively learn from different layers of T-GCN. The validity and effectiveness of our approach are demonstrated in the experimental results, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on six English benchmark datasets. Further experiments are conducted to analyze the contributions of each component in our approach and illustrate how different layers in T-GCN help ABSA with quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.231
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:
2910–2922
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.231
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.231
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanhe Tian, Guimin Chen, and Yan Song. 2021. Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Type-aware Graph Convolutional Networks and Layer Ensemble. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2910–2922, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Type-aware Graph Convolutional Networks and Layer Ensemble (Tian et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.231.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.231.mp4
Code
 cuhksz-nlp/ASA-TGCN +  additional community code
Data
MAMS