SenHint: A Joint Framework for Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis by Deep Neural Networks and Linguistic Hints

Abstract

The state-of-the-art techniques for aspect-level sentiment analysis focus on feature modeling using a variety of deep neural networks (DNN). Unfortunately, their practical performance may fall short of expectations due to semantic complexity of natural languages. Motivated by the observation that linguistic hints (e.g. explicit sentiment words and shift words) can be strong indicators of sentiment, we present a joint framework, SenHint, which integrates the output of deep neural networks and the implication of linguistic hints into a coherent reasoning model based on Markov Logic Network (MLN). In SenHint, linguistic hints are used in two ways: (1) to identify easy instances, whose sentiment can be automatically determined by machine with high accuracy; (2) to capture implicit relations between aspect polarities. We also empirically evaluate the performance of SenHint on both English and Chinese benchmark datasets. Our experimental results show that SenHint can effectively improve accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art alternatives.