Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction with Target-fused Neural Sequence Labeling

Zhifang Fan, Zhen Wu, Xin-Yu Dai, Shujian Huang, Jiajun Chen


Abstract
Opinion target extraction and opinion words extraction are two fundamental subtasks in Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Recently, many methods have made progress on these two tasks. However, few works aim at extracting opinion targets and opinion words as pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence labeling subtask for ABSA named TOWE (Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction), which aims at extracting the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target. A target-fused sequence labeling neural network model is designed to perform this task. The opinion target information is well encoded into context by an Inward-Outward LSTM. Then left and right contexts of the opinion target and the global context are combined to find the corresponding opinion words. We build four datasets for TOWE based on several popular ABSA benchmarks from laptop and restaurant reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the other compared methods significantly. We believe that our work may not only be helpful for downstream sentiment analysis task, but can also be used for pair-wise opinion summarization.
Anthology ID:
N19-1259
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2509–2518
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1259
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1259
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhifang Fan, Zhen Wu, Xin-Yu Dai, Shujian Huang, and Jiajun Chen. 2019. Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction with Target-fused Neural Sequence Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2509–2518, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction with Target-fused Neural Sequence Labeling (Fan et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1259.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1259.mp4
Code
 NJUNLP/TOWE
Data
SemEval-2014 Task-4