PSA-GAT: Integrating position-syntax and cross-aspect graph attention networks for aspect-based sentiment analysis

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is widely applied in analyzing user review data on web platforms to identify sentiment polarity toward specific aspects of web reviews. However, individual reviews often contain multiple conditions and coordinating and conflicting elements or relationships, which significantly increases the complexity of this task. In recent years, exploiting semantic–syntactic information with graph neural networks has been widely used to address such tasks. However, such methods overlook the features of the location influence factor of words and may provide irrelevant or even interfering noisy signals for ABSA because of the word association relationships mined by the syntax tree and semantic composition tree. To alleviate the effect of noise information and fully strengthen the context for multiple-aspect representation in ABSA, we propose a new framework, PSA-GAT, that mines information on position importance, syntactic–semantic dependencies and cross-aspect correlations. Overall, the structural features of the multi-aspect sentiment set are learned by using various variations of graph neural networks. Moreover, the experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PSA-GAT compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhouning6000/PSA_GAT.