Recently, some span-based methods have achieved encouraging performances for joint aspect-sentiment analysis, which first extract aspects (aspect extraction) by detecting aspect boundaries and then classify the span-level sentiments (sentiment classification). However, most existing approaches either sequentially extract task-specific features, leading to insufficient feature interactions, or they encode aspect features and sentiment features in a parallel manner, implying that feature representation in each task is largely independent of each other except for input sharing. Both of them ignore the internal correlations between the aspect extraction and sentiment classification. To solve this problem, we novelly propose a hierarchical interactive network (HI-ASA) to model two-way interactions between two tasks appropriately, where the hierarchical interactions involve two steps: shallow-level interaction and deep-level interaction. First, we utilize cross-stitch mechanism to combine the different task-specific features selectively as the input to ensure proper two-way interactions. Second, the mutual information technique is applied to mutually constrain learning between two tasks in the output layer, thus the aspect input and the sentiment input are capable of encoding features of the other task via backpropagation. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate HI-ASA’s superiority over baselines.

The rapid development of knowledge graphs (KGs), such as Freebase and WordNet, has changed the paradigm for AI-related applications. However, even though these KGs are impressively large, most of them are suffering from incompleteness, which leads to performance degradation of AI applications. Most existing researches are focusing on knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models. Nevertheless, those models simply embed entities and relations into latent vectors without leveraging the rich information from the relation structure. Indeed, relations in KGs conform to a three-layer hierarchical relation structure (HRS), i.e., semantically similar relations can make up relation clusters and some relations can be further split into several fine-grained sub-relations. Relation clusters, relations and sub-relations can fit in the top, the middle and the bottom layer of three-layer HRS respectively. To this end, in this paper, we extend existing KGE models TransE, TransH and DistMult, to learn knowledge representations by leveraging the information from the HRS. Particularly, our approach is capable to extend other KGE models. Finally, the experiment results clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach against baselines.