Customer sentiment recognition in conversation based on bidirectional LSTM and self-attention mechanism

Abstract

In the E-commerce environment, conversations between customers and businesses contain lots of useful information about customer sentiment. By mining that information, customer sentiment can be validly identified, which is helpful in accurately identifying customer needs and improving customer satisfaction. For conversational sentiment analysis, most existing approaches take contextual information into account. On this basis, we focus on the degree of association between utterances, which can more effectively capture overall and useful sentiment information in conversation. For this purpose, we propose a hybrid model to recognize customer sentiment in conversation. The model obtains utterance vectors with sentiment information through Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training (SKEP), then uses the bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM) to generate contextual semantic information, and further obtains customer sentiment information by applying the self-attention mechanism to focus on the degree of association between utterances. The experimental results on the JD Dialog dataset show that our model can more accurately recognize customer sentiment than other baseline models in customer service conversation.