Event Graph Neural Network for Opinion Target Classification of Microblog Comments

Abstract

Opinion target classification of microblog comments is one of the most important tasks for public opinion analysis about an event. Due to the high cost of manual labeling, opinion target classification is generally considered as a weak-supervised task. This article attempts to address the opinion target classification of microblog comments through an event graph convolution network (EventGCN) in a weak-supervised manner. Specifically, we take microblog contents and comments as document nodes, and construct an event graph with three typical relationships of event microblogs, including the co-occurrence relationship of event keywords extracted from microblogs, the reply relationship of comments, and the document similarity. Finally, under the supervision of a small number of labels, both word features and comment features can be represented well to complete the classification. The experimental results on two event microblog datasets show that EventGCN can significantly improve the classification performance compared with other baseline models.