From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Enhancing Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis via Multi-Level Relational Modeling

Omkar Mahesh Kashyap, Padegal Amit, Madhav Kashyap, Ashwini M Joshi, Shylaja S S


Abstract
Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) aims to predict sentiment polarity for specific aspect terms, a task complicated by conflicting sentiments and limited context in short texts. Existing graph-based approaches rely on predefined pairwise structures to capture different linguistic views. However, this leads to two key limitations: (1) their pairwise formulation often requires multiple graphs to improve expressive capacity, and (2) their reliance on predefined parsers or heuristic graph construction limits adaptability to sentence-specific sentiment composition. We propose HyperATSA, a dynamic hypergraph framework that overcomes these limitations through a single instance-specific hypergraph constructed directly from contextual token representations. Hyperedges are dynamically induced via hierarchical agglomerative clustering over token embeddings, where an acceleration-based cutoff identifies sentence-specific semantic groupings and enables adaptive hypergraph construction. Experiments on Lap14, Rest14, and MAMS demonstrate consistent improvements over strong graph-based baselines, suggesting that hypergraph-based relational modeling generalizes effectively to short-text sentiment composition.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-srw.53
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Juan Diego Rodriguez, Ona de Gibert
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
595–608
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.53/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Omkar Mahesh Kashyap, Padegal Amit, Madhav Kashyap, Ashwini M Joshi, and Shylaja S S. 2026. From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Enhancing Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis via Multi-Level Relational Modeling. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), pages 595–608, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Enhancing Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis via Multi-Level Relational Modeling (Kashyap et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.53.pdf