Incorporating Global Information for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

Aspect category sentiment analysis aims to automatically identify the sentiment polarities of aspect categories mentioned in text, and is widely used in the data analysis of product reviews and social media. Most existing studies typically limit themselves to utilizing sentence-level local information, thereby failing to fully exploit the potential of document-level and corpus-level global information. To address these limitations, we propose a model that integrates global information for aspect category sentiment analysis, aiming to leverage sentence-level, document-level, and corpus-level information simultaneously. Specifically, based on sentences and their corresponding aspect categories, a graph neural network is initially built to capture document-level information, including sentiment consistency within the same category and sentiment similarity between different categories in a review. We subsequently employ a memory network to retain corpus-level information, where the representations of training instances serve as keys and their associated labels as values. Additionally, a k-nearest neighbor retrieval mechanism is used to find training instances relevant to a given input. Experimental results on four commonly used datasets from SemEval 2015 and 2016 demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. The in-depth experimental analysis reveals that incorporating document-level information substantially improves the accuracies of the two primary ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories, while the inclusion of corpus-level information is especially advantageous for identifying the less frequently occurring ‘neutral’ category.