A Graph Convolutional Network Based on Sentiment Support for Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Aspect-level sentiment analysis is a research focal point for natural language comprehension. An attention mechanism is a very important approach for aspect-level sentiment analysis, but it only fuses sentences from a semantic perspective and ignores grammatical information in the sentences. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are a better method for processing syntactic information; however, they still face problems in effectively combining semantic and syntactic information. This paper presents a sentiment-supported graph convolutional network (SSGCN). This SSGCN first obtains the semantic information of the text through aspect-aware attention and self-attention; then, a grammar mask matrix and a GCN are applied to preliminarily combine semantic information with grammatical information. Afterward, the processing of these information features is divided into three steps. To begin with, features related to the semantics and grammatical features of aspect words are extracted. The second step obtains the enhanced features of the semantic and grammatical information through sentiment support words. Finally, it concatenates the two features, thus enhancing the effectiveness of the attention mechanism formed from the combination of semantic and grammatical information. The experimental results show that compared with benchmark models, the SSGCN had an improved accuracy of 6.33–0.5%. In macro F1 evaluation, its improvement range was 11.68–0.5%.

Keywords

• aspect-level sentiment analysis
• graph convolutional network
• attention mechanisms
• sentiment support words