Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) is a new subtask of ABSA, which aims to extract the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target in a sentence. Recently, neural network methods have been applied to this task and achieve promising results. However, the difficulty of annotation causes the datasets of TOWE to be insufficient, which heavily limits the performance of neural models. By contrast, abundant review sentiment classification data are easily available at online review sites. These reviews contain substantial latent opinions information and semantic patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel model to transfer these opinions knowledge from resource-rich review sentiment classification datasets to low-resource task TOWE. To address the challenges in the transfer process, we design an effective transformation method to obtain latent opinions, then integrate them into TOWE. Extensive experimental results show that our model achieves better performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods and significantly outperforms the base model without transferring opinions knowledge. Further analysis validates the effectiveness of our model.
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…
Nanjing University(南京大学);Nanjing University of Science and Technology(南京理工大学)
Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (AFOE) aims at extracting aspect terms and opinion terms from review in the form of opinion pairs or additionally extracting sentiment polarity of aspect term to form opinion triplet. Because of containing several opinion factors, the complete AFOE task is usually divided into multiple subtasks and achieved in the pipeline. However, pipeline approaches easily suffer from error propagation and inconvenience in real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel tagging scheme, Grid Tagging Scheme (GTS), to address the AFOE task in an end-to-end …
Nanyang Technological University(南洋理工大学);SAP Innovation Center Singapore(SAP新加坡创新中心)
In aspect-based sentiment analysis, most existing methods either focus on aspect/opinion terms extraction or aspect terms categorization. However, each task by itself only provides partial information to end users. To generate more detailed and structured opinion analysis, we propose a finer-grained problem, which we call category-specific aspect and opinion terms extraction. This problem involves the identification of aspect and opinion terms within each sentence, as well as the categorization of the identified terms. To this end, we propose an end-to-end multi-task attention model, where eac…
Aspect and opinion terms extraction from review texts is one of the key tasks in aspect-based sentiment analysis. In order to extract aspect and opinion terms for Indonesian hotel reviews, we adapt double embeddings feature and attention mechanism that outperform the best system at SemEval 2015 and 2016. We conduct experiments using 4000 reviews to find the best configuration and show the influences of double embeddings and attention mechanism toward model performance. Using 1000 reviews for evaluation, we achieved F1-measure of 0.914 and 0.90 for aspect and opinion terms extraction in token a…
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets from a sentence, including target entities, associated sentiment polarities, and opinion spans which rationalize the polarities. Existing methods are short on building correlation between target-opinion pairs, and neglect the mutual interference among different sentiment triplets. To address these issues, we utilize a two-stage framework to enhance the correlation between targets and opinions: at stage one, we extract targets and opinions through sequence tagging; then we append a group of artificial tags named Perceivable Pai…
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…
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University(深圳大学计算机与软件学院);Tencent Inc.(腾讯公司)
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract aspect term (aspect), sentiment and opinion term (opinion) triplets from sentences and can tell a complete story, i.e., the discussed aspect, the sentiment toward the aspect, and the cause of the sentiment. ASTE is a charming task, however, one triplet extracted by ASTE only includes one opinion of the aspect, but an aspect in a sentence may have multiple corresponding opinions and one opinion only provides part of the reason why the aspect has this sentiment, as a consequence, some triplets extracted by ASTE are hard to understand, an…
Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) is a subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). Given a sentence and an aspect term occurring in the sentence, TOWE extracts the corresponding opinion words for the aspect term. TOWE has two types of instance. In the first type, aspect terms are associated with at least one opinion word, while in the second type, aspect terms do not have corresponding opinion words. However, previous researches trained and evaluated their models with only the first type of instance, resulting in a sample selection bias problem. Specifically, TOWE models w…
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);DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group(阿里巴巴集团达摩院)
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is the most recent subtask of ABSA which outputs triplets of an aspect target, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term. Recent models perform the triplet extraction in an end-to-end manner but heavily rely on the interactions between each target word and opinion word. Thereby, they cannot perform well on targets and opinions which contain multiple words. Our proposed span-level approach explicitly considers the interaction between the whole spans of targets and opinions when predicting their sentiment relation. Thus, it can make p…
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi(德里印度理工学院);University of Houston(休斯顿大学)
Opinion phrase extraction is one of the key tasks in fine-grained sentiment analysis. While opinion expressions could be generic subjective expressions, aspect specific opinion expressions contain both the aspect as well as the opinion expression within the original sentence context. In this work, we formulate the task as an instance of token-level sequence labeling. When multiple aspects are present in a sentence, detection of opinion phrase boundary becomes difficult and label of each word depend not only upon the surrounding words but also with the concerned aspect. We propose a neural netw…
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)(巴斯克地区大学(UPV/EHU))
In this research note we present a language independent system to model Opinion Target Extraction (OTE) as a sequence labelling task. The system consists of a combination of clustering features implemented on top of a simple set of shallow local features. Experiments on the well known Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) benchmarks show that our approach is very competitive across languages, obtaining best results for six languages in seven different datasets. Furthermore, the results provide further insights into the behaviour of clustering features for sequence labelling tasks. The system …
University of Oregon(俄勒冈大学);Adobe Research(奥多比研究院);VinAI Research(越南人工智能研究院)
Targeted opinion word extraction (TOWE) is a sub-task of aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) which aims to find the opinion words for a given aspect-term in a sentence. Despite their success for TOWE, the current deep learning models fail to exploit the syntactic information of the sentences that have been proved to be useful for TOWE in the prior research. In this work, we propose to incorporate the syntactic structures of the sentences into the deep learning models for TOWE, leveraging the syntax-based opinion possibility scores and the syntactic connections between the words. We also int…
Tokyo Institute of Technology(东京工业大学);Microsoft STCA(微软(亚洲)互联网工程院);Nanjing University(南京大学);Microsoft Research Asia(微软亚洲研究院);Westlake University(西湖大学)
Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction (TOWE) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract the corresponding opinion words of a given opinion target from the sentence. Recently, deep learning approaches have made remarkable progress on this task. Nevertheless, the TOWE task still suffers from the scarcity of training data due to the expensive data annotation process. Limited labeled data increase the risk of distribution shift between test data and training data. In this paper, we propose exploiting massive unlabeled data to reduce the risk by increasing the exposure of the…
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…
College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University(南开大学人工智能学院);Cloopen Research(容联云研究院)
Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE), which aims to identify aspects from review sentences along with their corresponding opinion expressions and sentiments, is an emerging task in fine-grained opinion mining. Since ASTE consists of multiple subtasks, including opinion entity extraction, relation detection, and sentiment classification, it is critical and challenging to appropriately capture and utilize the associations among them. In this paper, we transform ASTE task into a multi-turn machine reading comprehension (MTMRC) task and propose a bidirectional MRC (BMRC) framework to address…
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…
Classic information extraction techniques consist in building questions and answers about the facts. Indeed, it is still a challenge to subjective information extraction systems to identify opinions and feelings in context. In sentiment-based NLP tasks, there are few resources to information extraction, above all offensive or hateful opinions in context. To fill this important gap, this short paper provides a new cross-lingual and contextual offensive lexicon, which consists of explicit and implicit offensive and swearing expressions of opinion, which were annotated in two different classes: c…
Fine-grained sentiment analysis is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Extracting opinion target expressions (OTE) in reviews is often an important step in fine-grained, aspect-based sentiment analysis. Retrieving this information from user-generated text, however, can be difficult. Customer reviews, for instance, are prone to contain misspelled words and are difficult to process due to their domain-specific language. In this work, we investigate whether character-level models can improve the performance for the identification of opinion target expressions. We integrate information…
Aspect extraction can be used in dialogue systems to understand the topic of opinionated text. Expressing an empathetic reaction to an opinion can strengthen the bond between a human and, for example, a robot. The aim of this study is three-fold: 1. create a new annotated dataset for both aspect extraction and opinion words for Dutch childrens language, 2. acquire aspect extraction results for this task and 3. improve current results for aspect extraction in Dutch reviews. This was done by training a deep learning Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model, originally developed for an English review dat…
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…
Jheronimus Academy of Data Science(杰罗尼莫斯数据科学学院);Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia(印度尼西亚爱资哈尔大学);Ninja Van(Ninja Van(印尼快递公司))
Aspect and opinion term extraction is a critical step in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Our study focuses on evaluating transfer learning using pre-trained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) to classify tokens from hotel reviews in bahasa Indonesia. The primary challenge is the language informality of the review texts. By utilizing transfer learning from a multilingual model, we achieved up to 2% difference on token level F1-score compared to the state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM model with fewer training epochs (3 vs. 200 epochs). The fine-tuned model clearly outperforms the Bi-LSTM model on the enti…
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) deals with extracting opinion triplets, consisting of an opinion target or aspect, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term/span explaining the rationale behind the sentiment. Existing research efforts are majorly tagging-based. Among the methods taking a sequence tagging approach, some fail to capture the strong interdependence between the three opinion factors, whereas others fall short of identifying triplets with overlapping aspect/opinion spans. A recent grid tagging approach on the other hand fails to capture the span-level s…
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.
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 …
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to recognize targets, their sentiment polarities and opinions explaining the sentiment from a sentence. ASTE could be naturally divided into 3 atom subtasks, namely target detection, opinion detection and sentiment classification. We argue that the proper subtask combination, compositional feature extraction for target-opinion pairs, and interaction between subtasks would be the key to success. Prior work, however, may fail on `one-to-many' or `many-to-one' situations or derive non-existent sentiment triplets due to defective subtask formulation,…
Reproducing experiments is an important instrument to validate previous work and build upon existing approaches. It has been tackled numerous times in different areas of science. In this paper, we introduce an empirical replicability study of three well-known algorithms for syntactic centric aspect-based opinion mining. We show that reproducing results continues to be a difficult endeavor, mainly due to the lack of details regarding preprocessing and parameter setting, as well as due to the absence of available implementations that clarify these details. We consider these are important threats…
Large Language Models Unpack Complex Political Opinions through Target-Stance Extraction
Department of Methodology and Statistics, Utrecht University(方法论与统计学系,乌特雷赫特大学);Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University(语言、文学与传播系,乌特雷赫特大学)
University of Sheffield(谢菲尔德大学);Beihang University(北京航空航天大学)
Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) (Fan et al., 2019b) is a new subtask of target-oriented sentiment analysis that aims to extract opinion words for a given aspect in text. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage position embeddings to capture the relative position of a word to the target. However, the performance of these methods depends on the ability to incorporate this information into word representations. In this paper, we explore a variety of text encoders based on pretrained word embeddings or language models that leverage part-of-speech and position embeddings, aiming t…
Text is the main method of communicating information in the digital age. Messages, blogs, news articles, reviews, and opinionated information abound on the Internet. People commonly purchase products online and post their opinions about purchased items. This feedback is displayed publicly to assist others with their purchasing decisions, creating the need for a mechanism with which to extract and summarize useful information for enhancing the decision-making process. Our contribution is to improve the accuracy of extraction by combining different techniques from three major areas, named Data M…
Video reviews are the natural evolution of written product reviews. In this paper we target this phenomenon and introduce the first dataset created from closed captions of YouTube product review videos as well as a new attention-RNN model for aspect extraction and joint aspect extraction and sentiment classification. Our model provides state-of-the-art performance on aspect extraction without requiring the usage of hand-crafted features on the SemEval ABSA corpus, while it outperforms the baseline on the joint task. In our dataset, the attention-RNN model outperforms the baseline for both task…
University of Illinois at Chicago(伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校);RTI International(RTI国际)
One of the key tasks of sentiment analysis of product reviews is to extract product aspects or features that users have expressed opinions on. In this work, we focus on using supervised sequence labeling as the base approach to performing the task. Although several extraction methods using sequence labeling methods such as Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) have been proposed, we show that this supervised approach can be significantly improved by exploiting the idea of concept sharing across multiple domains. For example, "screen" is an aspect in iPhone, but not onl…
Citing legal opinions is a key part of legal argumentation, an expert task that requires retrieval, extraction and summarization of information from court decisions. The identification of legally salient parts in an opinion for the purpose of citation may be seen as a domain-specific formulation of a highlight extraction or passage retrieval task. As similar tasks in other domains such as web search show significant attention and improvement, progress in the legal domain is hindered by the lack of resources for training and evaluation. This paper presents a new dataset that consists of the cit…
Relational fact extraction aims to extract semantic triplets from unstructured text. In this work, we show that all of the relational fact extraction models can be organized according to a graph-oriented analytical perspective. An efficient model, aDjacency lIst oRiented rElational faCT (DIRECT), is proposed based on this analytical framework. To alleviate challenges of error propagation and sub-task loss equilibrium, DIRECT employs a novel adaptive multi-task learning strategy with dynamic sub-task loss balancing. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, and results prov…
Beihang University(北京航空航天大学);University of Sheffield(谢菲尔德大学);University of Ottawa(渥太华大学)
Opinion target extraction (OTE) or aspect extraction (AE) is a fundamental task in opinion mining that aims to extract the targets (or aspects) on which opinions have been expressed. Recent work focus on cross-domain OTE, which is typically encountered in real-world scenarios, where the testing and training distributions differ. Most methods use domain adversarial neural networks that aim to reduce the domain gap between the labelled source and unlabelled target domains to improve target domain performance. However, this approach only aligns feature distributions and does not account for class…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation(语言、认知与计算研究所);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院)
We present a neural framework for opinion summarization from online product reviews which is knowledge-lean and only requires light supervision (e.g., in the form of product domain labels and user-provided ratings). Our method combines two weakly supervised components to identify salient opinions and form extractive summaries from multiple reviews: an aspect extractor trained under a multi-task objective, and a sentiment predictor based on multiple instance learning. We introduce an opinion summarization dataset that includes a training set of product reviews from six diverse domains and human…
Yonsei University(延世大学);University of Florida(佛罗里达大学);California State University, Chico(加州州立大学奇科分校);Iowa State University(爱荷华州立大学)
A new opinion extraction method is proposed to summarize unstructured, user-generated content (i.e., online customer reviews) in the fixed topic domains. To differentiate the current approach from other opinion extraction approaches, which are often exposed to a sparsity problem and lack of sentiment scores, a confirmatory aspect-based opinion mining framework is introduced along with its practical algorithm called DiSSBUS. In this procedure, 1) each customer review is disintegrated into a set of clauses; 2) each clause is summarized to bi-terms-a topic word and an evaluation word-using a part…
Lack of labeled training data is a major bottleneck for neural network based aspect and opinion term extraction on product reviews. To alleviate this problem, we first propose an algorithm to automatically mine extraction rules from existing training examples based on dependency parsing results. The mined rules are then applied to label a large amount of auxiliary data. Finally, we study training procedures to train a neural model which can learn from both the data automatically labeled by the rules and a small amount of data accurately annotated by human. Experimental results show that althou…
Aspect-based sentiment analysis involves the recognition of so called opinion target expressions (OTEs). To automatically extract OTEs, supervised learning algorithms are usually employed which are trained on manually annotated corpora. The creation of these corpora is labor-intensive and sufficiently large datasets are therefore usually only available for a very narrow selection of languages and domains. In this work, we address the lack of available annotated data for specific languages by proposing a zero-shot cross-lingual approach for the extraction of opinion target expressions. We lever…
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 …
Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学);Sinovation Ventures(创新工场)
Aspect term extraction aims to extract aspect terms from review texts as opinion targets for sentiment analysis. One of the big challenges with this task is the lack of sufficient annotated data. While data augmentation is potentially an effective technique to address the above issue, it is uncontrollable as it may change aspect words and aspect labels unexpectedly. In this paper, we formulate the data augmentation as a conditional generation task: generating a new sentence while preserving the original opinion targets and labels. We propose a masked sequence-to-sequence method for conditional…
Dialogue-based relation extraction (DiaRE) aims to detect the structural information from unstructured utterances in dialogues. Existing relation extraction models may be unsatisfactory under such a conversational setting, due to the entangled logic and information sparsity issues in utterances involving multiple speakers. To this end, we introduce SOLS, a novel model which can explicitly induce speaker-oriented latent structures for better DiaRE. Specifically, we learn latent structures to capture the relationships among tokens beyond the utterance boundaries, alleviating the entangled logic …
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)
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Tencent AI Lab(腾讯人工智能实验室);Northeastern University(东北大学)
Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), a key sub-task in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, aims to extract explicit aspect expressions from online user reviews. We present a new framework for tackling ATE. It can exploit two useful clues, namely opinion summary and aspect detection history. Opinion summary is distilled from the whole input sentence, conditioned on each current token for aspect prediction, and thus the tailor-made summary can help aspect prediction on this token. Another clue is the information of aspect detection history, and it is distilled from the previous aspect predictions so as to…
National Centre for Text Mining(国家文本挖掘中心);The University of Manchester(曼彻斯特大学);Toyota Technological Institute(丰田工业大学);Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)(人工智能研究中心(AIRC),产业技术综合研究所(AIST))
Document-level relation extraction is a complex human process that requires logical inference to extract relationships between named entities in text. Existing approaches use graph-based neural models with words as nodes and edges as relations between them, to encode relations across sentences. These models are node-based, i.e., they form pair representations based solely on the two target node representations. However, entity relations can be better expressed through unique edge representations formed as paths between nodes. We thus propose an edge-oriented graph neural model for document-lev…
Opinion mining is the branch of computation that deals with opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions of people and their different aspects. This field has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. Aspect-level (called aspect-based opinion mining) is often desired in practical applications as it provides detailed opinions or sentiments about different aspects of entities and entities themselves, which are usually required for action. Aspect extraction and entity extraction are thus two core tasks of aspect-based opinion mining. his paper has presented a framework of aspect-b…