Gated Hierarchical LSTMs for Target-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

In the field of target-based sentiment analysis, the deep neural model combining attention mechanism is a remarkable success. In current research, it is commonly seen that attention mechanism is combined with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. However, such neural network-based architectures generally rely on complex computation and only focus on single target. In this paper, we propose a gated hierarchical LSTM (GH-LSTMs) model which combines regional LSTM and sentence-level LSTM via a gated operation for the task of target-based sentiment analysis. This approach can distinguish different polarities of sentiment of different targets in the same sentence through a regional LSTM. Furthermore, it is able to concentrate on the long-distance dependency of target in the whole sentence via a sentence-level LSTM. The final results of our experiments on multi-domain datasets of two languages from SemEval 2016 indicate that our approach yields better performance than Support Vector Machine (SVM) and several typical neural network models. A case study of some typical examples also makes a supplement to this conclusion.