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 (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
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/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.53/
DOI:
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 (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), 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/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.53.pdf