Content Attention Model for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect based sentiment classification is a crucial task for sentiment analysis. Recent advances in neural attention models demonstrate that they can be helpful in aspect based sentiment classification tasks, which can help identify the focus words in human. However, according to our empirical study, prevalent content attention mechanisms proposed for aspect based sentiment classification mostly focus on identifying the sentiment words or shifters, without considering the relevance of such words with respect to the given aspects in the sentence. Therefore, they are usually insufficient for dealing with multi-aspect sentences and the syntactically complex sentence structures. To solve this problem, we propose a novel content attention based aspect based sentiment classification model, with two attention enhancing mechanisms: sentence-level content attention mechanism is capable of capturing the important information about given aspects from a global perspective, whiles the context attention mechanism is responsible for simultaneously taking the order of the words and their correlations into account, by embedding them into a series of customized memories. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art, in which the proposed mechanisms play a key role.