2019/04/10 by Ziqian Zeng, Zeng, Ziqian, Wenxuan Zhou +5
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining #Text and Document Classification Technologies #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.05055
openalex publication_date 2019/04/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as "supervision." These word pairs can be extracted by using dependency parsers and simple rules. Our objective is to predict an opinion word given a target word while our ultimate goal is to learn a sentiment polarity classifier to predict the sentiment polarity of each aspect given a document. By introducing a latent variable, i.e., the sentiment polarity, to the objective function, we can inject the sentiment polarity classifier to the objective via the variational lower bound. We can learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound. We show that our method can outperform weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised method with hundreds of labels per aspect.