AsU-OSum: Aspect-augmented unsupervised opinion summarization

Abstract

Opinion summarization can facilitate user’s decision-making by mining the salient review information. However, due to the lack of sufficient annotated data, most of the early works are based on extractive methods, which restricts the performance of opinion summarization. In this work, we aim to improve the informativeness of opinion summarization to provide better guidance to users. We consider the setting with only reviews without corresponding summaries, and propose an aspect-augmented model for unsupervised abstractive opinion summarization, denoted as AsU-OSum. We first employ an aspect-based sentiment analysis system to extract opinion phrases from reviews. Then, we construct a heterogeneous graph consisting of reviews and opinion clusters as nodes, which is used to enhance the Transformer-based encoder–decoder framework. Furthermore, we design a novel cascaded attention mechanism to prompt the decoder to pay more attention to the aspects that are more likely to appear in summary. During training, we introduce a sentiment accuracy reward that further enhances the learning ability of our model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the Yelp, Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes datasets. Automatic evaluation results show that our model is competitive and performs better than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on some ROUGE metrics. Human evaluation results further verify that our model can generate more informative summaries and reduce redundancy.