Triplet Contrastive Learning for Aspect Level Sentiment Classification

Abstract

The domain of Aspect Level Sentiment Classification, in which the sentiment toward a given aspect is analyzed, attracts much attention in NLP. Recently, the state-of-the-art Aspect Level Sentiment Classification methods are devised by using the Graph Convolutional Networks to deal with both the semantics and the syntax of the sentence. Generally, the parsing of syntactic structure inevitably incorporates irrelevant information toward the aspect. Besides, the syntactic and semantic alignment and uniformity that contribute to the sentiment delivery is currently neglected during processing. In this work, a Triplet Contrastive Learning Network is developed to coordinate the syntactic information and the semantic information. To start with, the aspect-oriented sub-tree is constructed to replace the syntactic adjacency matrix. Further, a sentence-level contrastive learning scheme is proposed to highlight the features of sentiment words. Based on The Triple Contrastive Learning, the syntactic information and the semantic information are thoroughly interacted and coordinated whilst the global semantics and syntax can be exploited. Extensive experiments are performed on three benchmark datasets and achieve accuracies (BERT-based) of 87.40, 82.80, 77.55 on Rest14, Lap14, and Twitter datasets, which demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in Aspect Level Sentiment Classification task.