Aspect category detection is one of the important and challenging subtasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Given a set of pre-defined categories, this task aims to detect categories which are indicated implicitly or explicitly in a given review sentence. Supervised machine learning approaches perform well to accomplish this subtask. Note that, the performance of these methods depends on the availability of labeled train data, which is often difficult and costly to obtain. Besides, most of these supervised methods require feature engineering to perform well. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to address aspect category detection task without the need for any feature engineering. Our method utilizes clusters of unlabeled reviews and soft cosine similarity measure to accomplish aspect category detection task. Experimental results on SemEval-2014 restaurant dataset shows that proposed unsupervised approach outperforms several baselines by a substantial margin.
@cite_4: Consumers are often forced to wade through many on-line reviews in order to make an informed product choice. This paper introduces Opine, an unsupervised information-extraction system which mines reviews in order to build a model of important product features, their evaluation by reviewers, and their relative quality across products.Compared to previous work, Opine achieves 22 higher precision (with only 3 lower recall) on the feature extraction task. Opine's novel use of relaxation labeling for finding the semantic orientation of words in context leads to strong performance on the tasks of finding opinion phrases and their polarity.
@cite_7: This paper describes our submissions to the Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis task of SemEval-2016. For Aspect Category Detection (Subtask1 Slot1), we used multiple ensembles, based on Support Vector Machine classifiers. For Opinion Target Expression extraction (Subtask1 Slot2), we used a sequence labeling approach with Conditional Random Fields. For Polarity Detection (Subtask1 Slot3), we used an ensemble of two supervised classifiers, one based on hand crafted features and one based on word embeddings. Our systems were ranked in the top 6 positions in all the tasks we participated. The source code of our systems is publicly available.
@cite_5: Analysis of opinions, known as opinion mining or sentiment analysis, has attracted a great deal of attention recently due to many practical applications and challenging research problems. In this article, we study two important problems, namely, opinion lexicon expansion and opinion target extraction. Opinion targets (targets, for short) are entities and their attributes on which opinions have been expressed. To perform the tasks, we found that there are several syntactic relations that link opinion words and targets. These relations can be identified using a dependency parser and then utilized to expand the initial opinion lexicon and to extract targets. This proposed method is based on bootstrapping. We call it double propagation as it propagates information between opinion words and targets. A key advantage of the proposed method is that it only needs an initial opinion lexicon to start the bootstrapping process. Thus, the method is semi-supervised due to the use of opinion word seeds. In evaluation, we compare the proposed method with several state-of-the-art methods using a standard product review test collection. The results show that our approach outperforms these existing methods significantly.
@cite_15: Reviews depict sentiments of customers towards various aspects of a product or service. Some of these aspects can be grouped into coarser aspect categories. SemEval-2014 had a shared task (Task 4) on aspect-level sentiment analysis, with over 30 teams participated. In this paper, we describe our submissions, which stood first in detecting aspect categories, first in detecting sentiment towards aspect categories, third in detecting aspect terms, and first and second in detecting sentiment towards aspect terms in the laptop and restaurant domains, respectively.
@cite_16: This paper describes our system submitted to Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis Task 5 of SemEval-2016. Our system consists of two components: binary classifiers trained using single layer feedforward network for aspect category classification (Slot 1), and sequential labeling classifiers for opinion target extraction (Slot 2). Besides extracting a variety of lexicon features, syntactic features, and cluster features, we explore the use of deep learning systems to provide additional neural network features. Our system achieves the best performances on the English datasets, ranking 1st for four evaluations (Slot 1 for both restaurant and laptop domains, Slot 2, and Slot 1 & 2).
@cite_12: Merchants selling products on the Web often ask their customers to review the products that they have purchased and the associated services. As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This makes it difficult for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. It also makes it difficult for the manufacturer of the product to keep track and to manage customer opinions. For the manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell the same product and the manufacturer normally produces many kinds of products. In this research, we aim to mine and to summarize all the customer reviews of a product. This summarization task is different from traditional text summarization because we only mine the features of the product on which the customers have expressed their opinions and whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting a subset or rewrite some of the original sentences from the reviews to capture the main points as in the classic text summarization. Our task is performed in three steps: (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. This paper proposes several novel techniques to perform these tasks. Our experimental results using reviews of a number of products sold online demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques.
Early works for addressing aspect extraction relied on approaches such as identifying frequent nouns and noun phrases using association rule mining, dependency relations, and lexical patterns @cite_12 @cite_5 @cite_4 . The SemEval workshops, over the course of three years, has included aspect-based sentiment analysis in their competitions. One of the subtasks introduced during SemEval is aspect category detection, which our proposed method is going to address. Most of the supervised approaches proposed to address this subtask utilizing machine learning algorithms and train a set of the one-vs-all classifier using hand-crafted features @cite_15 , @cite_7 , @cite_16 .