Enhancing aspect category detection in imbalanced online reviews: An integrated approach using Select-SMOTE and LightGBM

Aspect category detection (ACD) is a pivotal subtask within the field of sentiment analysis in natural language processing, aiming to identify implicit aspect category information in online review texts. In real-world scenarios of online review category detection tasks, data imbalance often arises, leading to skewed distributions among distinct review categories. This phenomenon poses substantial challenges for accurately recognizing minority categories through modeling. To address this, we propose a method for detecting imbalanced aspect categories by combining the selective synthetic over-sampling (Select-SMOTE) algorithm with the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM). Our approach commences with text data representation through features, followed by a strategy involving joint sample partitioning and boundary optimization within the feature space to generate minority class samples. This partitioning strategy aligns generated data more closely with the original distribution, while the boundary optimization module enhances classification performance by eliminating samples near boundaries. Subsequently, the balanced dataset is input to the LGB model, enabling the extraction of aspect category information through parameter optimization and class weight assignment. Finally, our method is evaluated using the SemEval and SentiHood datasets and compared with prevailing sampling methods and classification models. Empirical results manifestly demonstrate the method’s superiority across diverse metrics, reflecting robustness and effective mitigation of imbalanced data challenges in ACD.