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/
- DOI:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.53.pdf