NAACL’19: Utilizing BERT for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Constructing Auxiliary Sentence

Arthur Lee
4 min readMay 9, 2020

Natural Language Processing paper challenge (2/30)

paper link

What problem do they solve?

Given a sentence, we have to classify the sentiment.

TABSA: Given a sentence, we have multiple target and for each target we want to know the aspects and its polarity (sentiment).

For example,

s: LOCATION1 is often considered the coolest area of London.

It has 1 target: LOCATION1. And for this target, we have 4 aspects: (general, price, safety, transit-location) and its polarities (positive, None, None, None)

ABSA: The target-aspect pairs {t, a} become only aspects a.

For example,

s: LOCATION1 is often considered the coolest area of London.

This sentence has 4 aspects: (general, price, safety, transit-location) and its polarities (positive, None, None, None).

What model do they propose?

Construction of the auxiliary sentence:

Sentences for QA-M:

input: target-aspect pair (LOCATION1, safety)

output: “what do you think of the safety of location — 1?”

Sentences for NLI-M:

input: target-aspect pair (LOCATION1, safety)

output:“location — 1 — safety”

Sentences for QA-B:

input: target-aspect pair (LOCATION1, safety, positive)

output: “the polarity of the aspect safety of location — 1 is positive”

Sentences for NLI-B:

For QA-B, we add the label information and temporarily convert TABSA into a binary classification problem.

input: target-aspect pair (LOCATION1, safety, positive)

output: “location — 1 — safety — positive”

They convert the original ABSA problem to question answering (QA) problem and natural language inference (NLI) problem.

BERT-single-TABSA: We consider TABSA as a combination of target-aspect-related sentiment classification problems.

BERT-pair-QA-M: They applying the sentence-pair classification approach to solve TABSA with QA-M.

BERT-pair-NLI-M: They applying the sentence-pair classification approach to solve TABSA with NLI-M.

BERT-pair-QA-B: They applying the sentence-pair classification approach to solve TABSA with QA-B.

BERT-pair-NLI-B: They applying the sentence-pair classification approach to solve TABSA with NLI-B.

Data

SentiHood dataset:

it consists of 5,215 sentences:

3,862 of which contain a single target

1,353 of which contain multiple targets

For each sentence, it contains a list of target-aspect-sentiment (t-a-y) pairs <target, aspect, sentiment)

SemEval-2014:

The only difference from the SentiHood is that the target-aspect pairs {t, a} become only aspects a.

Hyperparameters

The number of Transformer blocks: 12

The hidden layer size:768

The number of self-attention heads: 12

The total number of parameters for the pretrained model is 110M

Baseline model

LR: a logistic regression classifier with n-gram and pos-tag features.

LSTM-Final: a biLSTM model with the final state as a representation

LSTM-Loc: a biLSTM model with the state associated with the target position as a representation

LSTM+TA+SA: a biLSTM model which introduces complex target-level and sentence-level attention mechanisms

SenticLSTM: an upgraded version of the LSTM+TA+SA model which introduces external information from SenticNet

Dmu-Entnet: a bidirectional EntNet with external “memory chains” with a delayed memory update mechanism to track entities

Result

Other related blogs:

Beyond Clicks: Dwell Time for Personalization

RecSys’15: Context-Aware Event Recommendation in Event-based Social Networks

RecSys’11: Utilizing related products for post-purchase recommendation in e-commerce

RecSys11: OrdRec: an ordinal model for predicting personalized item rating distributions

RecSys16: Adaptive, Personalized Diversity for Visual Discovery

RecSys ’16: Local Item-Item Models for Top-N Recommendation

COLING’14: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentiment Analysis of Short Texts

Best paper in RecSys:

https://recsys.acm.org/best-papers/

My Website:

https://light0617.github.io/#/

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Arthur Lee

An machine learning engineer in Bay Area in the United States