Syntactic edge-enhanced graph convolutional networks for aspect-level sentiment classification with interactive attention

Abstract

Aspect-level sentiment classification is a hot research topic in natural language processing (NLP). One of the key challenges is that how to develop effective algorithms to model the relationships between aspects and opinion words appeared in a sentence. Among the various methods proposed in the literature, the graph convolutional networks (GCNs) achieve the promising results due to their good ability to capture the long distance between the aspects and the opinion words. However, the existing methods cannot effectively leverage the edge information of dependency parsing tree, resulting in the sub-optimal results. In this article, we propose a syntactic edge-enhanced graph convolutional network (ASEGCN) for aspect-level sentiment classification with interactive attention. Our proposed method can effectively learn better representations of aspects and the opinion words by considering the different types of neighborhoods with the edge constraint. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct the experiments on five standard sentiment classification results. Our results demonstrate that our proposed method obtains the better performance than the state-of-the-art models on four datasets, and achieves a comparative performance on Rest16.