Dependency trees have been intensively used with graph neural networks for aspect-based sentiment classification. Though being effective, such methods rely on external dependency parsers, which can be unavailable for low-resource languages or perform worse in low-resource domains. In addition, dependency trees are also not optimized for aspect-based sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose an aspect-specific and language-agnostic discrete latent opinion tree model as an alternative structure to explicit dependency trees. To ease the learning of complicated structured latent variables, we build a connection between aspect-to-context attention scores and syntactic distances, inducing trees from the attention scores. Results on six English benchmarks and one Chinese dataset show that our model can achieve competitive performance and interpretability.
In this paper, we introduce a new task called synesthesia detection, which aims to extract the sensory word of a sentence, and to predict the original and synesthetic sensory modalities of the corresponding sensory word. Synesthesia refers to the description of perceptions in one sensory modality through concepts from other modalities. It involves not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought and action, which makes it become a bridge between figurative linguistic phenomenon and abstract cognition, and thus be helpful to understand the deep semantics. To address this, we construct a large-scale human-annotated Chinese synesthesia dataset, which contains 7,217 annotated sentences accompanied by 187 sensory words. Based on this dataset, we propose a family of strong and representative baseline models. Upon these baselines, we further propose a radical-based neural network model to identify the boundary of the sensory word, and to jointly detect the original and synesthetic sensory modalities for the word. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the importance of the proposed task and dataset can be verified by the statistics and progressive performances. In addition, our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on the synesthesia dataset.
Previous studies on cross-domain sentiment classification depend on the pivot features or utilize the target data for representation learning, which ignore the semantic relevance between different domains. To this end, we exploit Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to help with cross-domain sentiment classification. Compared with the textual input, AMR reduces data sparsity and explicitly provides core semantic knowledge and correlations between different domains. In particular, we develop an algorithm to construct a sentiment-driven semantic graph from sentence-level AMRs. We further design two strategies to linearize the semantic graph and propose a text-graph interaction model to fuse the text and semantic graph representations for cross-domain sentiment classification. Empirical studies show the effectiveness of our proposed model over several strong baselines. The results also indicate the importance of the proposed sentiment-driven semantic graph for cross-domain sentiment classification.
In logographic languages like Chinese, word meanings are constructed using specific character formations, which can help to disambiguate word senses and are beneficial for sentiment classification. However, such knowledge is rarely explored in previous sentiment analysis methods. In this paper, we focus on exploring the logographic information for aspect-based sentiment classification in Chinese text. Specifically, we employ a logographic image to capture an internal morphological structure from the character sequence. The logographic image is also used to learn the external relations among context and aspect words. Furthermore, we propose a multimodal language model to explicitly incorporate a logographic image with review text for aspect-based sentiment classification in Chinese. Experimental results show that our method brings substantial performance improvement over strong baselines. The results also indicate that the logographic image is very important for exploring the internal structure and external relations from the character sequence.
Recent work on document-level sentiment classification has shown that the sentiment in the original text is often hard to capture, since the sentiment is usually either expressed implicitly or shifted due to the occurrences of negation and rhetorical words. To this end, we enhance the original text with a sentiment-driven simplified clause to intensify its sentiment. The simplified clause shares the same opinion with the original text but expresses the opinion much more simply. Meanwhile, we employ Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) for generating simplified clauses, since AMR explicitly provides core semantic knowledge, and potentially offers core concepts and explicit structures of original texts. Empirical studies show the effectiveness of our proposed model over several strong baselines. The results also indicate the importance of simplified clauses for sentiment classification.
As an important research topic, customer service dialogue generation tends to generate generic seller responses by leveraging current dialogue information. In this study, we propose a novel and extensible dialogue generation method by leveraging sellers’ historical dialogue information, which can be both accessible and informative. By utilizing innovative historical dialogue representation learning and historical dialogue selection mechanism, the proposed model is capable of detecting most related responses from sellers’ historical dialogues, which can further enhance the current dialogue generation quality. Unlike prior dialogue generation efforts, we treat each seller’s historical dialogues as a list of Customer-Seller utterance pairs and allow the model to measure their different importance, and copy words directly from most relevant pairs. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach can generate high-quality responses that cater to specific sellers’ characteristics and exhibit consistent superiority over baselines on a real-world multi-turn customer service dialogue dataset.
Sentiment forecasting in dialog aims to predict the polarity of next utterance to come, and can help speakers revise their utterances in sentimental utterances generation. However, the polarity of next utterance is normally hard to predict, due to the lack of content of next utterance (yet to come). In this study, we propose a Neural Sentiment Forecasting (NSF) model to address inherent challenges. In particular, we employ a neural simulation model to simulate the next utterance based on the context (previous utterances encountered). Moreover, we employ a sequence influence model to learn both pair-wise and seq-wise influence. Empirical studies illustrate the importance of proposed sentiment forecasting task, and justify the effectiveness of our NSF model over several strong baselines.
There have been a recent line of works to automatically predict the emotions of posts in social media. Existing approaches consider the posts individually and predict their emotions independently. Different from previous researches, we explore the dependence among relevant posts via the authors’ backgrounds, since the authors with similar backgrounds, e.g., gender, location, tend to express similar emotions. However, such personal attributes are not easy to obtain in most social media websites, and it is hard to capture attributes-aware words to connect similar people. Accordingly, we propose a Neural Personal Discrimination (NPD) approach to address above challenges by determining personal attributes from posts, and connecting relevant posts with similar attributes to jointly learn their emotions. In particular, we employ adversarial discriminators to determine the personal attributes, with attention mechanisms to aggregate attributes-aware words. In this way, social correlationship among different posts can be better addressed. Experimental results show the usefulness of personal attributes, and the effectiveness of our proposed NPD approach in capturing such personal attributes with significant gains over the state-of-the-art models.
Stance detection aims to assign a stance label (for or against) to a post toward a specific target. Recently, there is a growing interest in using neural models to detect stance of documents. Most of these works model the sequence of words to learn document representation. However, much linguistic information, such as polarity and arguments of the document, is correlated with the stance of the document, and can inspire us to explore the stance. Hence, we present a neural model to fully employ various linguistic information to construct the document representation. In addition, since the influences of different linguistic information are different, we propose a hierarchical attention network to weigh the importance of various linguistic information, and learn the mutual attention between the document and the linguistic information. The experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical attention neural model.
There has been a recent line of work automatically learning scripts from unstructured texts, by modeling narrative event chains. While the dominant approach group events using event pair relations, LSTMs have been used to encode full chains of narrative events. The latter has the advantage of learning long-range temporal orders, yet the former is more adaptive to partial orders. We propose a neural model that leverages the advantages of both methods, by using LSTM hidden states as features for event pair modelling. A dynamic memory network is utilized to automatically induce weights on existing events for inferring a subsequent event. Standard evaluation shows that our method significantly outperforms both methods above, giving the best results reported so far.
We present opinion recommendation, a novel task of jointly generating a review with a rating score that a certain user would give to a certain product which is unreviewed by the user, given existing reviews to the product by other users, and the reviews that the user has given to other products. A characteristic of opinion recommendation is the reliance of multiple data sources for multi-task joint learning. We use a single neural network to model users and products, generating customised product representations using a deep memory network, from which customised ratings and reviews are constructed jointly. Results show that our opinion recommendation system gives ratings that are closer to real user ratings on Yelp.com data compared with Yelp’s own ratings. our methods give better results compared to several pipelines baselines.
Emotions in code-switching text can be expressed in either monolingual or bilingual forms. However, relatively little research has emphasized on code-switching text. In this paper, we propose a Bilingual Attention Network (BAN) model to aggregate the monolingual and bilingual informative words to form vectors from the document representation, and integrate the attention vectors to predict the emotion. The experiments show that the effectiveness of the proposed model. Visualization of the attention layers illustrates that the model selects qualitatively informative words.