Sharing is Caring! Joint Multitask Learning Helps Aspect-Category Extraction and Sentiment Detection in Scientific Peer Reviews

Abstract

The peer-review process is the benchmark of research validation. Peer-reviewed texts are the artifacts via which the editors/chairs decide the inclusion/exclusion of a paper in a journal or conference proceedings. Hence it is important for the editors/chairs to carefully analyze the peer-review text from various aspects of the paper (e.g., novelty, substance, soundness, etc.), identify the underlying sentiment of the reviewers, and thereby validate the informativeness of the reviews before making a decision. With the rise in research paper submissions, the current peer-review system is experiencing an unprecedented information overload. Sometimes it becomes stressful for the chairs/editors to make a reasonable decision within the stringent timelines. Here in this work, we attempt an interesting problem to automatically extract the aspect and sentiment from the peer-review texts. We design an end-to-end deep multitask learning model to perform aspect extraction and sentiment classification simultaneously. We show that both these tasks help each other in the predictions. We achieve encouraging performance on a recently released dataset of peer-review texts. We make our codes available for further research11https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#aspect-category-sentiment.