Joint modeling of causal phrases-sentiments-aspects using Hierarchical Pitman Yor Process

Abstract

Traditional sentiment-aware topic models assume that topic or sentiment transition occurs from either a sentence to the next sentence or from a word to the next word. Such models cannot capture a topic or sentiment transition at phrase boundaries. Further, most of the models adopt a sentiment lexicon to initialize sentiment priors and this approach induces coverage problems. To overcome the above-cited limitations, we have proposed a topic model that extracts aspects, sentiments, and causal phrases simultaneously by leveraging Hierarchical Pitman Yor Process (HPYP) that is modified using a sentiment component, a word-tagger to guide the causal phrase generation and a sentiment prior initialized through a sequential model to address coverage problems. We have evaluated our model on six datasets and found that the proposed model outperforms the baselines in terms of perplexity by 14%, topical coherence by 20%, topic diversity by 5%, sentiment classification task’s accuracy by 4% and, precision, recall and F1 score by 2%. Ablation studies assert that sequence model based sentiment prior initialization results in increasing the accuracy of sentiment classification by 2%.