Deep Memory Networks for Attitude Identification

We consider the task of identifying attitudes towards a given set of entities from text. Conventionally, this task is decomposed into two separate subtasks: target detection that identifies whether each entity is mentioned in the text, either explicitly or implicitly, and polarity classification that classifies the exact sentiment towards an identified entity (the target) into positive, negative, or neutral. Instead, we show that attitude identification can be solved with an end-to-end machine learning architecture, in which the two subtasks are interleaved by a deep memory network. In this way, signals produced in target detection provide clues for polarity classification, and reversely, the predicted polarity provides feedback to the identification of targets. Moreover, the treatments for the set of targets also influence each other -- the learned representations may share the same semantics for some targets but vary for others. The proposed deep memory network, the AttNet, outperforms methods that do not consider the interactions between the subtasks or those among the targets, including conventional machine learning methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning models.Comment: Accepted to WSDM'1

SemEval-2016 task 5 : aspect based sentiment analysis

International audienceThis paper describes the SemEval 2016 shared task on Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), a continuation of the respective tasks of 2014 and 2015. In its third year, the task provided 19 training and 20 testing datasets for 8 languages and 7 domains, as well as a common evaluation procedure. From these datasets, 25 were for sentence-level and 14 for text-level ABSA; the latter was introduced for the first time as a subtask in SemEval. The task attracted 245 submissions from 29 teams

Attentional Encoder Network for Targeted Sentiment Classification

Targeted sentiment classification aims at determining the sentimental tendency towards specific targets. Most of the previous approaches model context and target words with RNN and attention. However, RNNs are difficult to parallelize and truncated backpropagation through time brings difficulty in remembering long-term patterns. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Attentional Encoder Network (AEN) which eschews recurrence and employs attention based encoders for the modeling between context and target. We raise the label unreliability issue and introduce label smoothing regularization. We also apply pre-trained BERT to this task and obtain new state-of-the-art results. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and lightweight of our model.Comment: 7 page