Sentence Compression for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis, which addresses the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has received considerable attention in recent years. In contrast to the traditional coarse-grained sentiment analysis tasks, such as document-level sentiment classification, we are interested in the fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis that aims to identify aspects that users comment on and these aspects’ polarities. Aspect-based sentiment analysis relies heavily on syntactic features. However, the reviews that this task focuses on are natural and spontaneous, thus posing a challenge to syntactic parsers. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a framework of adding a sentiment sentence compression (Sent_Comp) step before performing the aspect-based sentiment analysis. Different from the previous sentence compression model for common news sentences, Sent_Comp seeks to remove the sentiment-unnecessary information for sentiment analysis, thereby compressing a complicated sentiment sentence into one that is shorter and easier to parse. We apply a discriminative conditional random field model, with certain special features, to automatically compress sentiment sentences. Using the Chinese corpora of four product domains, Sent_Comp significantly improves the performance of the aspect-based sentiment analysis. The features proposed for Sent_Comp, especially the potential semantic features, are useful for sentiment sentence compression.