Joint Aspect-Sentiment Analysis with Minimal User Guidance

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a substantial step towards text understanding which benefits numerous applications. Since most existing algorithms require a large amount of labeled data or substantial external language resources, applying them on a new domain or a new language is usually expensive and time-consuming. We aim to build an aspect-based sentiment analysis model from an unlabeled corpus with minimal guidance from users, i.e., only a small set of seed words for each aspect class and each sentiment class. We employ an autoencoder structure with attention to learn two dictionary matrices for aspect and sentiment respectively where each row of the dictionary serves as an embedding vector for an aspect or a sentiment class. We propose to utilize the user-given seed words to regularize the dictionary learning. In addition, we improve the model by joining the aspect and sentiment encoder in the reconstruction of sentiment in sentences. The joint structure enables sentiment embeddings in the dictionary to be tuned towards the aspect-specific sentiment words for each aspect, which benefits the classification performance. We conduct experiments on two real data sets to verify the effectiveness of our models.