Graph Convolutional Networks with Structural Attention Model for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

With the amount of user-generated information on the Web, identifying the sentiment polarity of the given aspect provides more complete and in-depth results for businesses and customers. Aspect based sentiment analysis has gained increasing attention in decade years, but it remains a daunting task. Recently, approaches based on recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks have shown competitive results in this field. However, they don’t take fully account of the entire text structure and the relation between words in a given document. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network method to address this problem, in which the text is treated as a graph and the aspect is the specific area of the graph. For the first time, we apply graph convolutional neural networks and structural attention model to aspect based sentiment analysis. Experiments on public-available datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our model.