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Targeted Sentiment Classification with Attentional Encoder Network

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Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2019: Text and Time Series (ICANN 2019)

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Abstract

Targeted sentiment classification aims at determining the sentimental tendency towards specific targets. Most of the previous approaches model context and target words with RNN and attention. However, RNNs are difficult to parallelize and truncated backpropagation through time brings difficulty in remembering long-term patterns. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Attentional Encoder Network (AEN) which eschews recurrence and employs attention based encoders for the modeling between context and target. We raise the label unreliability issue and introduce label smoothing regularization. We also apply pre-trained BERT to this task and obtain new state-of-the-art results. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and lightweight of our model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The detailed introduction of this task can be found at http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2014/task4.

  2. 2.

    We use uncased BERT-base from https://github.com/google-research/bert.

  3. 3.

    NVIDIA GTX 1080ti.

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Acknowledgement

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61673403, U1611262).

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Correspondence to Jiahai Wang .

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Song, Y., Wang, J., Jiang, T., Liu, Z., Rao, Y. (2019). Targeted Sentiment Classification with Attentional Encoder Network. In: Tetko, I., Kůrková, V., Karpov, P., Theis, F. (eds) Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2019: Text and Time Series. ICANN 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11730. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30490-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30490-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30489-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30490-4

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