Incorporating word significance into aspect-level sentiment analysis

Abstract

Aspect-level sentiment analysis has drawn growing attention in recent years, with higher performance achieved through the attention mechanism. Despite this, previous research does not consider some human psychological evidence relating to language interpretation. This results in attention being paid to less significant words especially when the aspect word is far from the relevant context word or when an important context word is found at the end of a long sentence. We design a novel model using word significance to direct attention towards the most significant words, with novelty decay and incremental interpretation factors working together as an alternative for position based models. The interpretation factor represents the maximization of the degree each new encountered word contributes to the sentiment polarity and a counter balancing stretched exponential novelty decay factor represents decaying human reaction as a sentence gets longer. Our findings support the hypothesis that the attention mechanism needs to be applied to the most significant words for sentiment interpretation and that novelty decay is applicable in aspect-level sentiment analysis with a decay factor β = 0.7.