Coupling Global and Local Context for Unsupervised Aspect Extraction

Ming Liao, Jing Li, Haisong Zhang, Lingzhi Wang, Xixin Wu, Kam-Fai Wong


Abstract
Aspect words, indicating opinion targets, are essential in expressing and understanding human opinions. To identify aspects, most previous efforts focus on using sequence tagging models trained on human-annotated data. This work studies unsupervised aspect extraction and explores how words appear in global context (on sentence level) and local context (conveyed by neighboring words). We propose a novel neural model, capable of coupling global and local representation to discover aspect words. Experimental results on two benchmarks, laptop and restaurant reviews, show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models from previous studies evaluated with varying metrics. Analysis on model output show our ability to learn meaningful and coherent aspect representations. We further investigate how words distribute in global and local context, and find that aspect and non-aspect words do exhibit different context, interpreting our superiority in unsupervised aspect extraction.
Anthology ID:
D19-1465
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4579–4589
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1465
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1465
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ming Liao, Jing Li, Haisong Zhang, Lingzhi Wang, Xixin Wu, and Kam-Fai Wong. 2019. Coupling Global and Local Context for Unsupervised Aspect Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4579–4589, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coupling Global and Local Context for Unsupervised Aspect Extraction (Liao et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1465.pdf