Better Queries for Aspect-Category Sentiment Classification

Abstract

Aspect-category sentiment classification (ACSC) aims to identify the sentiment polarities towards the aspect categories mentioned in a sentence. Because a sentence often mentions more than one aspect category and expresses different sentiment polarities to them, finding aspect category-related information from the sentence is the key challenge to accurately recognize the sentiment polarity. Most previous models take both sentence and aspect category as input and query aspect category-related information based on the aspect category. However, these models represent the aspect category as a context-independent vector called aspect embedding, which may not be effective enough as a query. In this paper, we propose two contextualized aspect category representations, Contextualized Aspect Vector (CAV) and Contextualized Aspect Matrix (CAM). Specifically, we use the coarse aspect category-related information found by the aspect category detection task to generate CAV or CAM. Then the CAV or CAM as queries are used to search for fine-grained aspect category-related information like aspect embedding by aspect-category sentiment classification models. In experiments, we integrate the proposed CAV and CAM into several representative aspect embedding-based aspect-category sentiment classification models. Experimental results on the SemEval-2014 Restaurant Review dataset and the Multi-Aspect Multi-Sentiment dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of CAV and CAM.