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Span-based relational graph transformer network for aspect–opinion pair extraction

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Abstract

Aspect extraction and opinion extraction are two fundamental subtasks in aspect-based sentiment analysis. Many methods extract aspect terms or opinion terms but ignore the relationships between them. However, such relationships are crucial for downstream tasks, such as sentiment classification and commodity recommendation. Recently, methods have been proposed to extract both terms jointly; however, they fail to extract them as pairs. In this paper, we explore the aspect–opinion pair extraction task that aims to extract aspect and opinion terms in pairs. To carry out this task, we propose a span-based relational graph transformer network that consists of a span generator, a span classifier, and a relation detector. The span generator enumerates all possible spans to generate the candidates for aspect or opinion terms and filters non-aspects or non-opinions terms, while the relation classifier extracts aspect–opinion pairs. We propose a relational graph convolutional network to capture the dependent relationships between aspect and opinion terms. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance using four benchmark datasets.

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Notes

  1. https://alt.qcri.org/semeval2014/task4/.

  2. https://alt.qcri.org/semeval2015/task12/.

  3. https://alt.qcri.org/semeval2016/task5/.

  4. https://s3.amazonaws.com/models.huggingface.co/bert/bert-base-uncased.tar.gz.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedbacks. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U1811264, 62062027, and 61966009), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province (Nos. 2020GXNSFAA159012 and 2018GXNSFDA281049), the Science and Technology Major Project of Guangxi Province (No. AA19046004), the Innovation Project of Guangxi Graduate Education (No. YCBZ2021069), and the project of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software.

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  1. Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, 541004, China

    You Li, Chaoqiang Wang, Yuming Lin, Yongdong Lin & Liang Chang

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  1. You Li
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  2. Chaoqiang Wang
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  3. Yuming Lin
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  4. Yongdong Lin
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Correspondence to Yuming Lin.

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Li, Y., Wang, C., Lin, Y. et al. Span-based relational graph transformer network for aspect–opinion pair extraction. Knowl Inf Syst 64, 1305–1322 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-022-01675-8

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