Hyperbolic Disentangled Representation for Fine-Grained Aspect Extraction

Automatic identification of salient aspects from user reviews is especially useful for opinion analysis. There has been significant progress in utilizing weakly supervised approaches, which require only a small set of seed words for training aspect classifiers. However, there is always room for improvement. First, no weakly supervised approaches fully utilize latent hierarchies between words. Second, each seed word’s representation should have different latent semantics and be distinct when it represents a different aspect. In this paper we propose HDAE, a hyperbolic disentangled aspect extractor in which a hyperbolic aspect classifier captures words’ latent hierarchies, and an aspect-disentangled representation models the distinct latent semantics of each seed word. Compared to previous baselines, HDAE achieves average F1 performance gains of 18.2% and 24.1% on Amazon product review and restaurant review datasets, respectively. In addition, the embedding visualization experience demonstrates that HDAE is a more effective approach to leveraging seed words. An ablation study and a case study further attest the effectiveness of the proposed components.