Joint Inference for Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis by Deep Neural Networks and Linguistic Hints

Abstract

The state-of-the-art techniques for aspect-level sentiment analysis focused on feature modeling using a variety of deep neural networks (DNN). Unfortunately, their performance may still fall short of expectation in real scenarios due to the semantic complexity of natural languages. Motivated by the observation that many linguistic hints (e.g., sentiment words and shift words) are reliable polarity indicators, we propose a joint framework, SenHint, which can seamlessly integrate the output of deep neural networks and the implications of linguistic hints in a unified model based on Markov logic network (MLN). SenHint leverages the linguistic hints for multiple purposes: (1) to identify the easy instances, whose polarities can be automatically determined by the machine with high accuracy; (2) to capture the influence of sentiment words on aspect polarities; (2) to capture the implicit relations between aspect polarities. We present the required techniques for extracting linguistic hints, encoding their implications as well as the output of DNN into the unified model, and joint inference. Finally, we have empirically evaluated the performance of SenHint on both English and Chinese benchmark datasets. Our extensive experiments have shown that compared to the state-of-the-art DNN techniques, SenHint can effectively improve polarity detection accuracy by considerable margins.