Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is to predict the sentiment polarity towards a particular aspect in a sentence. Recently, this task has been widely addressed by the neural attention mechanism, which computes attention weights to softly select words for generating aspect-specific sentence representations. The attention is expected to concentrate on opinion words for accurate sentiment prediction. However, attention is prone to be distracted by noisy or misleading words, or opinion words from other aspects. In this paper, we propose an alternative hard-selection approach, which determines the start and end positions of the opinion snippet, and selects the words between these two positions for sentiment prediction. Specifically, we learn deep associations between the sentence and aspect, and the long-term dependencies within the sentence by leveraging the pre-trained BERT model. We further detect the opinion snippet by self-critical reinforcement learning. Especially, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and prove that our hard-selection approach outperforms soft-selection approaches when handling multi-aspect sentences.
Jilin University（吉林大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) aims at identifying the sentiment polarity of a specified aspect in a sentence. ALSC is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the aspect. To address this problem, recent works fine-tune pre-trained Transformer encoders for ALSC to extract an aspect-centric dependency tree that can locate the opinion words. However, the induced opinion words only provide an intuitive cue far below human-level interpretability. Besides, the pre-tr…
Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）；College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract aspect term, sentiment and opinion term triplets from sentences and tries to provide a complete solution for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). However, some triplets extracted by ASTE are confusing, since the sentiment in a triplet extracted by ASTE is the sentiment that the sentence expresses toward the aspect term rather than the sentiment of the aspect term and opinion term pair. In this paper, we introduce a more fine-grained Aspect-Sentiment-Opinion Triplet Extraction (ASOTE) Task. ASOTE also extracts aspect term, sentiment …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Aspect based sentiment analysis, predicting sentiment polarity of given aspects, has drawn extensive attention. Previous attention-based models emphasize using aspect semantics to help extract opinion features for classification. However, these works are either not able to capture opinion spans as a whole, or not able to capture variable-length opinion spans. In this paper, we present a neat and effective structured attention model by aggregating multiple linear-chain CRFs. Such a design allows the model to extract aspect-specific opinion spans and then evaluate sentiment polarity by exploitin…
Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) and aspect oriented opinion words extraction (AOWE) are two highly relevant aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) subtasks. They respectively aim to detect the sentiment polarity and extract the corresponding opinion words toward a given aspect in a sentence. Previous works separate them and focus on one of them by training neural models on small-scale labeled data, while neglecting the connections between them. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model, Opinion Transmission Network (OTN), to exploit the potential bridge between ALSC and AOWE t…
A general-audience introduction to the area of "sentiment analysis", the computational treatment of subjective, opinion-oriented language (an example application is determining whether a review is "thumbs up" or "thumbs down"). Some challenges, applications to business-intelligence tasks, and potential future directions are described.
University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）
Sentiment analysis AKA opinion mining is one of the most widely used NLP applications to identify human intentions from their reviews. In the education sector, opinion mining is used to listen to student opinions and enhance their learning-teaching practices pedagogically. With advancements in sentiment annotation techniques and AI methodologies, student comments can be labelled with their sentiment orientation without much human intervention. In this review article, (1) we consider the role of emotional analysis in education from four levels: document level, sentence level, entity level, and …
Sentiment analysis can be regarded as a relation extraction problem in which the sentiment of some opinion holder towards a certain aspect of a product, theme or event needs to be extracted. We present a novel neural architecture for sentiment analysis as a relation extraction problem that addresses this problem by dividing it into three subtasks: i) identification of aspect and opinion terms, ii) labeling of opinion terms with a sentiment, and iii) extraction of relations between opinion terms and aspect terms. For each subtask, we propose a neural network based component and combine all of t…
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Our day-to-day life has always been influenced by what people think. Ideas and opinions of others have always affected our own opinions. The explosion of Web 2.0 has led to increased activity in Podcasting, Blogging, Tagging, Contributing to RSS, Social Bookmarking, and Social Networking. As a result there has been an eruption of interest in people to mine these vast resources of data for opinions. Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining is the computational treatment of opinions, sentiments and subjectivity of text. In this report, we take a look at the various challenges and applications of Sen…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising …
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Yahoo! Research（雅虎研究院）；Huawei Research America（华为美国研究院）
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, co…
University of Jinan（济南大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Shaanxi Normal University（陕西师范大学）；Shihezi University（石河子大学）；Shanghai Institute of Technology（上海应用技术大学）
The Internet contains a wealth of public opinion on food safety, including views on food adulteration, food-borne diseases, agricultural pollution, irregular food distribution, and food production issues. In order to systematically collect and analyse public opinion on food safety, we developed IFoodCloud, a platform for the real-time sentiment analysis of public opinion on food safety in China. It collects data from more than 3,100 public sources that can be used to explore public opinion trends, public sentiment, and regional attention differences of food safety incidents. At the same time, …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Target-based sentiment analysis involves opinion target extraction and target sentiment classification. However, most of the existing works usually studied one of these two sub-tasks alone, which hinders their practical use. This paper aims to solve the complete task of target-based sentiment analysis in an end-to-end fashion, and presents a novel unified model which applies a unified tagging scheme. Our framework involves two stacked recurrent neural networks: The upper one predicts the unified tags to produce the final output results of the primary target-based sentiment analysis; The lower …
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
The state-of-the-art Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) approaches are mainly based on either detecting aspect terms and their corresponding sentiment polarities, or co-extracting aspect and opinion terms. However, the extraction of aspect-sentiment pairs lacks opinion terms as a reference, while co-extraction of aspect and opinion terms would not lead to meaningful pairs without determining their sentiment dependencies. To address the issue, we present a novel view of ABSA as an opinion triplet extraction task, and propose a multi-task learning framework to jointly extract aspect terms an…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Opinion summarization aims to profile a target by extracting opinions from multiple documents. Most existing work approaches the task in a semi-supervised manner due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality annotation from thousands of documents. Among them, some use aspect and sentiment analysis as a proxy for identifying opinions. In this work, we propose a new framework, FineSum, which advances this frontier in three aspects: (1) minimal supervision, where only aspect names and a few aspect/sentiment keywords are available; (2) fine-grained opinion analysis, where sentiment analysis dril…
Bhagwan Parshuram Institute of Technology（巴格万·帕舒拉姆理工学院）
Opinion mining and Sentiment analysis have emerged as a field of study since the widespread of World Wide Web and internet. Opinion refers to extraction of those lines or phrase in the raw and huge data which express an opinion. Sentiment analysis on the other hand identifies the polarity of the opinion being extracted. In this paper we propose the sentiment analysis in collaboration with opinion extraction, summarization, and tracking the records of the students. The paper modifies the existing algorithm in order to obtain the collaborated opinion about the students. The resultant opinion is …
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to unsupervised sentiment analysis. Instead of using ground truth provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as a supervision signal. For example, in a document snippet "the room is big," (room, big) is a target-opinion word pair. These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective function is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment classifier. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function…
Enhancing Investment Opinion Ranking through Argument-Based Sentiment Analysis
AIST（日本国立先进工业科学技术研究所）；Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科学研究所）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Ochanomizu University（御茶水女子大学）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
The classification of opinion texts in positive and negative is becoming a subject of great interest in sentiment analysis. The existence of many labeled opinions motivates the use of statistical and machine-learning methods. First-order statistics have proven to be very limited in this field. The Opinum approach is based on the order of the words without using any syntactic and semantic information. It consists of building one probabilistic model for the positive and another one for the negative opinions. Then the test opinions are compared to both models and a decision and confidence measure…
Bhagwan Parshuram Institute of Technology（巴格万·帕舒拉姆技术学院）
Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis is a process of identifying opinions in large unstructured/structured data and then analysing polarity of those opinions. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis have found vast application in analysing online ratings, analysing product based reviews, e-governance, and managing hostile content over the internet. This paper proposes an algorithm to implement aspect level sentiment analysis. The algorithm takes input from the remarks submitted by various teachers of a student. An aspect tree is formed which has various levels and weights are assigned to each b…
Generative models have demonstrated impressive results on Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks, particularly for the emerging task of extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment (ACOS) quadruples. However, these models struggle with implicit sentiment expressions, which are commonly observed in opinionated content such as online reviews. In this work, we introduce GEN-SCL-NAT, which consists of two techniques for improved structured generation for ACOS quadruple extraction. First, we propose GEN-SCL, a supervised contrastive learning objective that aids quadruple prediction by encoura…
Accenture（埃森哲）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
With the multitude of companies and organizations abound today, ranking them and choosing one out of the many is a difficult and cumbersome task. Although there are many available metrics that rank companies, there is an inherent need for a generalized metric that takes into account the different aspects that constitute employee opinions of the companies. In this work, we aim to overcome the aforementioned problem by generating aspect-sentiment based embedding for the companies by looking into reliable employee reviews of them. We created a comprehensive dataset of company reviews from the fam…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
The amount of opinionated data on the internet is rapidly increasing. More and more people are sharing their ideas and opinions in reviews, discussion forums, microblogs and general social media. As opinions are central in all human activities, sentiment analysis has been applied to gain insights in this type of data. There are proposed several approaches for sentiment classification. The major drawback is the lack of standardized solutions for classification and high-level visualization. In this study, a sentiment analyzer dashboard for online social networking analysis is proposed. This, to …
Relationship extraction and named entity recognition have always been considered as two distinct tasks that require different input data, labels, and models. However, both are essential for structured sentiment analysis. We believe that both tasks can be combined into a single stacked model with the same input data. We performed different experiments to find the best model to extract multiple opinion tuples from a single sentence. The opinion tuples will consist of holders, targets, and expressions. With the opinion tuples, we will be able to extract the relationship we need.
With the rapid growth of social media on the web, emotional polarity computation has become a flourishing frontier in the text mining community. However, it is challenging to understand the latest trends and summarize the state or general opinions about products due to the big diversity and size of social media data and this creates the need of automated and real time opinion extraction and mining. On the other hand, the bulk of current research has been devoted to study the subjective sentences which contain opinion keywords and limited work has been reported for objective statements that imp…
Wroclaw University of Technology（弗罗茨瓦夫技术大学）；Kenaz Technologies
This paper fills a gap in aspect-based sentiment analysis and aims to present a new method for preparing and analysing texts concerning opinion and generating user-friendly descriptive reports in natural language. We present a comprehensive set of techniques derived from Rhetorical Structure Theory and sentiment analysis to extract aspects from textual opinions and then build an abstractive summary of a set of opinions. Moreover, we propose aspect-aspect graphs to evaluate the importance of aspects and to filter out unimportant ones from the summary. Additionally, the paper presents a prototyp…
University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；University of Colombo（科伦坡大学）
Analyzing the sentiments of legal opinions available in Legal Opinion Texts can facilitate several use cases such as legal judgement prediction, contradictory statements identification and party-based sentiment analysis. However, the task of developing a legal domain specific sentiment annotator is challenging due to resource constraints such as lack of domain specific labelled data and domain expertise. In this study, we propose novel techniques that can be used to develop a sentiment annotator for the legal domain while minimizing the need for manual annotations of data.
A document which elaborates opinions and arguments related to the previous court cases is known as a legal opinion text. Lawyers and legal officials have to spend considerable effort and time to obtain the required information manually from those documents when dealing with new legal cases. Hence, it provides much convenience to those individuals if there is a way to automate the process of extracting information from legal opinion texts. Party-based sentiment analysis will play a key role in the automation system by identifying opinion values with respect to each legal parties in legal texts.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Megagon Labs（Megagon实验室）
We present OpinionDigest, an abstractive opinion summarization framework, which does not rely on gold-standard summaries for training. The framework uses an Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis model to extract opinion phrases from reviews, and trains a Transformer model to reconstruct the original reviews from these extractions. At summarization time, we merge extractions from multiple reviews and select the most popular ones. The selected opinions are used as input to the trained Transformer model, which verbalizes them into an opinion summary. OpinionDigest can also generate customized summaries…
ANU & NICTA（澳大利亚国立大学与NICTA）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Aspect-based opinion mining is widely applied to review data to aggregate or summarize opinions of a product, and the current state-of-the-art is achieved with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based model. Although social media data like tweets are laden with opinions, their "dirty" nature (as natural language) has discouraged researchers from applying LDA-based opinion model for product review mining. Tweets are often informal, unstructured and lacking labeled data such as categories and ratings, making it challenging for product opinion mining. In this paper, we propose an LDA-based opinion…
University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）；European Commission – Joint Research Centre（欧洲委员会联合研究中心）
Recent years have brought a significant growth in the volume of research in sentiment analysis, mostly on highly subjective text types (movie or product reviews). The main difference these texts have with news articles is that their target is clearly defined and unique across the text. Following different annotation efforts and the analysis of the issues encountered, we realised that news opinion mining is different from that of other text types. We identified three subtasks that need to be addressed: definition of the target; separation of the good and bad news content from the good and bad s…
As the type and the number of such venues increase, automated analysis of sentiment on textual resources has become an essential data mining task. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining opinions on the collection of informal short texts. Both positive and negative sentiment strength of texts are detected. We focus on a non-English language that has few resources for text mining. This approach would help enhance the sentiment analysis in languages where a list of opinionated words does not exist. We propose a new method projects the text into dense and low dimensional feature vecto…
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. Mining opinions expressed in the user generated content is a challenging yet practically very useful problem. This survey would cover various approaches and methodology used in Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining in general. The focus would be on Internet text like, Product review, tweets and other social media.
The application and usage of opinion mining, especially for business intelligence, product recommendation, targeted marketing etc. have fascinated many research attentions around the globe. Various research efforts attempted to mine opinions from customer reviews at different levels of granularity, including word-, sentence-, and document-level. However, development of a fully automatic opinion mining and sentiment analysis system is still elusive. Though the development of opinion mining and sentiment analysis systems are getting momentum, most of them attempt to perform document-level sentim…
STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Joint Laboratory of HUST and Pingan Property & Casualty Research (HPL)（华中科技大学与平安财产保险研究院联合实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance company of China, Ltd（中国平安财产保险股份有限公司）
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Yahoo! Research（雅虎研究院）；Huawei Research America（华为美国研究院）
Given a target name, which can be a product aspect or entity, identifying its aspect words and opinion words in a given corpus is a fine-grained task in target-based sentiment analysis (TSA). This task is challenging, especially when we have no labeled data and we want to perform it for any given domain. To address it, we propose a general two-stage approach. Stage one extracts/groups the target-related words (call t-words) for a given target. This is relatively easy as we can apply an existing semantics-based learning technique. Stage two separates the aspect and opinion words from the groupe…
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining has become an open research domain after proliferation of Internet and Web 2.0 social media. People express their attitudes and opinions on social media including blogs, discussion forums, tweets, etc. and, sentiment analysis concerns about detecting and extracting sentiment or opinion from online text. Sentiment based text classification is different from topical text classification since it involves discrimination based on expressed opinion on a topic. Feature selection is significant for sentiment analysis as the opinionated text may have high dimensions…
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；University of Colorado Denver（科罗拉多大学丹佛分校）
Public acceptance and support for renewable energy are important determinants of renewable energy policies and market conditions. This paper examines public sentiment toward solar energy in the United States using data from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform in which people post messages, known as tweets. We filtered tweets specific to solar energy and performed a classification task using Robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (RoBERTa). Analyzing 71,262 tweets during the period of late January to early July 2020, we find public sentiment varies significant…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Open-domain targeted sentiment analysis aims to detect opinion targets along with their sentiment polarities from a sentence. Prior work typically formulates this task as a sequence tagging problem. However, such formulation suffers from problems such as huge search space and sentiment inconsistency. To address these problems, we propose a span-based extract-then-classify framework, where multiple opinion targets are directly extracted from the sentence under the supervision of target span boundaries, and corresponding polarities are then classified using their span representations. We further…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；University of Pune（浦那大学）
With the advancement of web technology and its growth, there is a huge volume of data present in the web for internet users and a lot of data is generated too. Internet has become a platform for online learning, exchanging ideas and sharing opinions. Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ are rapidly gaining popularity as they allow people to share and express their views about topics,have discussion with different communities, or post messages across the world. There has been lot of work in the field of sentiment analysis of twitter data. This survey focuses mainly on sentime…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Internet and the proliferation of smart mobile devices have changed the way information is created, shared, and spreads, e.g., microblogs such as Twitter, weblogs such as LiveJournal, social networks such as Facebook, and instant messengers such as Skype and WhatsApp are now commonly used to share thoughts and opinions about anything in the surrounding world. This has resulted in the proliferation of social media content, thus creating new opportunities to study public opinion at a scale that was never possible before. Naturally, this abundance of data has quickly attracted business and resear…
Ferhat Abbas University（费尔哈特·阿巴斯大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
Recommender systems nowadays are playing an important role in the delivery of services and information to users. Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) is the process of determining the attitude of textual opinions, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. Data sparsity is representing a big issue for recommender systems because of the insufficiency of user rating or absence of data about users or items. This research proposed a hybrid approach combining sentiment analysis and recommender systems to tackle the problem of data sparsity problems by predicting the rating of prod…
With the increase of online customer opinions in specialised websites and social networks, the necessity of automatic systems to help to organise and classify customer reviews by domain-specific aspect/categories and sentiment polarity is more important than ever. Supervised approaches to Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis obtain good results for the domain/language their are trained on, but having manually labelled data for training supervised systems for all domains and languages are usually very costly and time consuming. In this work we describe W2VLDA, an almost unsupervised system based on …
Technical and Vocational University (TVU)（技术与职业大学（TVU））；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）
Today, the web has become a mandatory platform to express users' opinions, emotions and feelings about various events. Every person using his smartphone can give his opinion about the purchase of a product, the occurrence of an accident, the occurrence of a new disease, etc. in blogs and social networks such as (Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram) register. Therefore, millions of comments are recorded daily and it creates a huge volume of unstructured text data that can extract useful knowledge from this type of data by using natural language processing methods. Sentiment analysis is on…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been extensively studied in recent years, which typically involves four fundamental sentiment elements, including the aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Existing studies usually consider the detection of partial sentiment elements, instead of predicting the four elements in one shot. In this work, we introduce the Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) task, aiming to jointly detect all sentiment elements in quads for a given opinionated sentence, which can reveal a more comprehensive and complete aspect-level sentime…
