Comparative text mining extends from genre analysis and political bias detection to the revelation of cultural and geographic differences, through to the search for prior art across patents and scientific papers. These applications use cross-collection topic modeling for the exploration, clustering, and comparison of large sets of documents, such as digital libraries. However, topic modeling on documents from different collections is challenging because of domain-specific vocabulary. We present a cross-collection topic model combined with automatic domain term extraction and phrase segmentation. This model distinguishes collection-specific and collection-independent words based on information entropy and reveals commonalities and differences of multiple text collections. We evaluate our model on patents, scientific papers, newspaper articles, forum posts, and Wikipedia articles. In comparison to state-of-the-art cross-collection topic modeling, our model achieves up to 13% higher topic coherence, up to 4% lower perplexity, and up to 31% higher document classification accuracy. More importantly, our approach is the first topic model that ensures disjunct general and specific word distributions, resulting in clear-cut topic representations.
Dependency context-based word embedding jointly learns the representations of word and dependency context, and has been proved effective in aspect term extraction. In this paper, we design the positional dependency-based word embedding (PoD) which considers both dependency context and positional context for aspect term extraction. Specifically, the positional context is modeled via relative position encoding. Besides, we enhance the dependency context by integrating more lexical information (e.g., POS tags) along dependency paths. Experiments on SemEval 2014/2015/2016 datasets show that our approach outperforms other embedding methods in aspect term extraction.
Aspect and opinion term extraction is a critical step in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Our study focuses on evaluating transfer learning using pre-trained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) to classify tokens from hotel reviews in bahasa Indonesia. The primary challenge is the language informality of the review texts. By utilizing transfer learning from a multilingual model, we achieved up to 2% difference on token level F1-score compared to the state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM model with fewer training epochs (3 vs. 200 epochs). The fine-tuned model clearly outperforms the Bi-LSTM model on the entity level. Furthermore, we propose a method to include CRF with auxiliary labels as an output layer for the BERT-based models. The CRF addition further improves the F1-score for both token and entity level.
Recently, a variety of model designs and methods have blossomed in the context of the sentiment analysis domain. However, there is still a lack of wide and comprehensive studies of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). We want to fill this gap and propose a comparison with ablation analysis of aspect term extraction using various text embedding methods. We particularly focused on architectures based on long short-term memory (LSTM) with optional conditional random field (CRF) enhancement using different pre-trained word embeddings. Moreover, we analyzed the influence on the performance of extending the word vectorization step with character embedding. The experimental results on SemEval datasets revealed that not only does bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) outperform regular LSTM, but also word embedding coverage and its source highly affect aspect detection performance. An additional CRF layer consistently improves the results as well.
In this paper, we proposed a deep learning-based end-to-end method on the domain specified automatic term extraction (ATE), it considers possible term spans within a fixed length in the sentence and predicts them whether they can be conceptual terms. In comparison with current ATE methods, the model supports nested term extraction and does not crucially need extra (extracted) features. Results show that it can achieve high recall and a comparable precision on term extraction task with inputting segmented raw text.
Lack of labeled training data is a major bottleneck for neural network based aspect and opinion term extraction on product reviews. To alleviate this problem, we first propose an algorithm to automatically mine extraction rules from existing training examples based on dependency parsing results. The mined rules are then applied to label a large amount of auxiliary data. Finally, we study training procedures to train a neural model which can learn from both the data automatically labeled by the rules and a small amount of data accurately annotated by human. Experimental results show that although the mined rules themselves do not perform well due to their limited flexibility, the combination of human annotated data and rule labeled auxiliary data can improve the neural model and allow it to achieve performance better than or comparable with the current state-of-the-art.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis produces a list of aspect terms and their corresponding sentiments for a natural language sentence. This task is usually done in a pipeline manner, with aspect term extraction performed first, followed by sentiment predictions toward the extracted aspect terms. While easier to develop, such an approach does not fully exploit joint information from the two subtasks and does not use all available sources of training information that might be helpful, such as document-level labeled sentiment corpus. In this paper, we propose an interactive multi-task learning network (IMN) which is able to jointly learn multiple related tasks simultaneously at both the token level as well as the document level. Unlike conventional multi-task learning methods that rely on learning common features for the different tasks, IMN introduces a message passing architecture where information is iteratively passed to different tasks through a shared set of latent variables. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method against multiple baselines on three benchmark datasets.
We perform an interdisciplinary large-scale evaluation for detecting lexical semantic divergences in a diachronic and in a synchronic task: semantic sense changes across time, and semantic sense changes across domains. Our work addresses the superficialness and lack of comparison in assessing models of diachronic lexical change, by bringing together and extending benchmark models on a common state-of-the-art evaluation task. In addition, we demonstrate that the same evaluation task and modelling approaches can successfully be utilised for the synchronic detection of domain-specific sense divergences in the field of term extraction.
This paper presents a dataset and supervised learning experiments for term extraction from Slovene academic texts. Term candidates in the dataset were extracted via morphosyntactic patterns and annotated for their termness by four annotators. Experiments on the dataset show that most co-occurrence statistics, applied after morphosyntactic patterns and a frequency threshold, perform close to random and that the results can be significantly improved by combining, with supervised machine learning, all the seven statistic measures included in the dataset. On multi-word terms the model using all statistics obtains an AUC of 0.736 while the best single statistic produces only AUC 0.590. Among many additional candidate features, only adding multi-word morphosyntactic pattern information and length of the single-word term candidates achieves further improvements of the results.
This paper focuses on two related subtasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis, namely aspect term extraction and aspect sentiment classification, which we call aspect term-polarity co-extraction. The former task is to extract aspects of a product or service from an opinion document, and the latter is to identify the polarity expressed in the document about these extracted aspects. Most existing algorithms address them as two separate tasks and solve them one by one, or only perform one task, which can be complicated for real applications. In this paper, we treat these two tasks as two sequence labeling problems and propose a novel Dual crOss-sharEd RNN framework (DOER) to generate all aspect term-polarity pairs of the input sentence simultaneously. Specifically, DOER involves a dual recurrent neural network to extract the respective representation of each task, and a cross-shared unit to consider the relationship between them. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three benchmark datasets.
Automatic Multi-Word Term (MWT) extraction is a very important issue to many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, and text categorization. Although many methods have been used for MWT extraction in English and other European languages, few studies have been applied to Arabic. In this paper, we propose a novel, hybrid method which combines linguistic and statistical approaches for Arabic Multi-Word Term extraction. The main contribution of our method is to consider contextual information and both termhood and unithood for association measures at the statistical filtering step. In addition, our technique takes into account the problem of MWT variation in the linguistic filtering step. The performance of the proposed statistical measure (NLC-value) is evaluated using an Arabic environment corpus by comparing it with some existing competitors. Experimental results show that our NLC-value measure outperforms the other ones in term of precision for both bi-grams and tri-grams.
Requirements traceability is an essential step in ensuring the quality of software during the early stages of its development life cycle. Requirements tracing usually consists of document parsing, candidate link generation and evaluation and traceability analysis. This paper demonstrates the applicability of Statistical Term Extraction metrics to generate candidate links. It is applied and validated using two data sets and four types of filters two for each data set, 0.2 and 0.25 for MODIS, 0 and 0.05 for CM1. This method generates requirements traceability matrices between textual requirements artifacts (such as high-level requirements traced to low-level requirements). The proposed method includes ten word frequency metrics divided into three main groups for calculating the frequency of terms. The results show that the proposed method gives better result when compared with the traditional TF-IDF method.
Recurrent neural network architectures combining with attention mechanism, or neural attention model, have shown promising performance recently for the tasks including speech recognition, image caption generation, visual question answering and machine translation. In this paper, neural attention model is applied on two sequence classification tasks, dialogue act detection and key term extraction. In the sequence labeling tasks, the model input is a sequence, and the output is the label of the input sequence. The major difficulty of sequence labeling is that when the input sequence is long, it can include many noisy or irrelevant part. If the information in the whole sequence is treated equally, the noisy or irrelevant part may degrade the classification performance. The attention mechanism is helpful for sequence classification task because it is capable of highlighting important part among the entire sequence for the classification task. The experimental results show that with the attention mechanism, discernible improvements were achieved in the sequence labeling task considered here. The roles of the attention mechanism in the tasks are further analyzed and visualized in this paper.
In this paper, we develop a novel approach to aspect term extraction based on unsupervised learning of distributed representations of words and dependency paths. The basic idea is to connect two words (w1 and w2) with the dependency path (r) between them in the embedding space. Specifically, our method optimizes the objective w1 + r = w2 in the low-dimensional space, where the multi-hop dependency paths are treated as a sequence of grammatical relations and modeled by a recurrent neural network. Then, we design the embedding features that consider linear context and dependency context information, for the conditional random field (CRF) based aspect term extraction. Experimental results on the SemEval datasets show that, (1) with only embedding features, we can achieve state-of-the-art results; (2) our embedding method which incorporates the syntactic information among words yields better performance than other representative ones in aspect term extraction.
In terminology work, natural language processing, and digital humanities, several studies address the analysis of variations in context and meaning of terms in order to detect semantic change and the evolution of terms. We distinguish three different approaches to describe contextual variations: methods based on the analysis of patterns and linguistic clues, methods exploring the latent semantic space of single words, and methods for the analysis of topic membership. The paper presents the notion of context volatility as a new measure for detecting semantic change and applies it to key term extraction in a political science case study. The measure quantifies the dynamics of a term's contextual variation within a diachronic corpus to identify periods of time that are characterised by intense controversial debates or substantial semantic transformations.
Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) identifies opinionated aspect terms in texts and is one of the tasks in the SemEval Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) contest. The small amount of available datasets for supervised ATE and the costly human annotation for aspect term labelling give rise to the need for unsupervised ATE. In this paper, we introduce an architecture that achieves top-ranking performance for supervised ATE. Moreover, it can be used efficiently as feature extractor and classifier for unsupervised ATE. Our second contribution is a method to automatically construct datasets for ATE. We train a classifier on our automatically labelled datasets and evaluate it on the human annotated SemEval ABSA test sets. Compared to a strong rule-based baseline, we obtain a dramatically higher F-score and attain precision values above 80%. Our unsupervised method beats the supervised ABSA baseline from SemEval, while preserving high precision scores.
The World Wide Web holds a wealth of information in the form of unstructured texts such as customer reviews for products, events and more. By extracting and analyzing the expressed opinions in customer reviews in a fine-grained way, valuable opportunities and insights for customers and businesses can be gained. We propose a neural network based system to address the task of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis to compete in Task 2 of the ESWC-2016 Challenge on Semantic Sentiment Analysis. Our proposed architecture divides the task in two subtasks: aspect term extraction and aspect-specific sentiment extraction. This approach is flexible in that it allows to address each subtask independently. As a first step, a recurrent neural network is used to extract aspects from a text by framing the problem as a sequence labeling task. In a second step, a recurrent network processes each extracted aspect with respect to its context and predicts a sentiment label. The system uses pretrained semantic word embedding features which we experimentally enhance with semantic knowledge extracted from WordNet. Further features extracted from SenticNet prove to be beneficial for the extraction of sentiment labels. As the best performing system in its category, our proposed system proves to be an effective approach for the Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.
Sentiment analysis can be regarded as a relation extraction problem in which the sentiment of some opinion holder towards a certain aspect of a product, theme or event needs to be extracted. We present a novel neural architecture for sentiment analysis as a relation extraction problem that addresses this problem by dividing it into three subtasks: i) identification of aspect and opinion terms, ii) labeling of opinion terms with a sentiment, and iii) extraction of relations between opinion terms and aspect terms. For each subtask, we propose a neural network based component and combine all of them into a complete system for relational sentiment analysis. The component for aspect and opinion term extraction is a hybrid architecture consisting of a recurrent neural network stacked on top of a convolutional neural network. This approach outperforms a standard convolutional deep neural architecture as well as a recurrent network architecture and performs competitively compared to other methods on two datasets of annotated customer reviews. To extract sentiments for individual opinion terms, we propose a recurrent architecture in combination with word distance features and achieve promising results, outperforming a majority baseline by 18% accuracy and providing the first results for the USAGE dataset. Our relation extraction component outperforms the current state-of-the-art in aspect-opinion relation extraction by 15% F-Measure.
Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) detects opinionated aspect terms in sentences or text spans, with the end goal of performing aspect-based sentiment analysis. The small amount of available datasets for supervised ATE and the fact that they cover only a few domains raise the need for exploiting other data sources in new and creative ways. Publicly available review corpora contain a plethora of opinionated aspect terms and cover a larger domain spectrum. In this paper, we first propose a method for using such review corpora for creating a new dataset for ATE. Our method relies on an attention mechanism to select sentences that have a high likelihood of containing actual opinionated aspects. We thus improve the quality of the extracted aspects. We then use the constructed dataset to train a model and perform ATE with distant supervision. By evaluating on human annotated datasets, we prove that our method achieves a significantly improved performance over various unsupervised and supervised baselines. Finally, we prove that sentence selection matters when it comes to creating new datasets for ATE. Specifically, we show that, using a set of selected sentences leads to higher ATE performance compared to using the whole sentence set.
Automatic Term Extraction deals with the extraction of terminology from a domain specific corpus, and has long been an established research area in data and knowledge acquisition. ATE remains a challenging task as it is known that there is no existing ATE methods that can consistently outperform others in any domain. This work adopts a refreshed perspective to this problem: instead of searching for such a 'one-size-fit-all' solution that may never exist, we propose to develop generic methods to 'enhance' existing ATE methods. We introduce SemRe-Rank, the first method based on this principle, to incorporate semantic relatedness - an often overlooked venue - into an existing ATE method to further improve its performance. SemRe-Rank incorporates word embeddings into a personalised PageRank process to compute 'semantic importance' scores for candidate terms from a graph of semantically related words (nodes), which are then used to revise the scores of candidate terms computed by a base ATE algorithm. Extensively evaluated with 13 state-of-the-art base ATE methods on four datasets of diverse nature, it is shown to have achieved widespread improvement over all base methods and across all datasets, with up to 15 percentage points when measured by the Precision in the top ranked K candidate terms (the average for a set of K's), or up to 28 percentage points in F1 measured at a K that equals to the expected real terms in the candidates (F1 in short). Compared to an alternative approach built on the well-known TextRank algorithm, SemRe-Rank can potentially outperform by up to 8 points in Precision at top K, or up to 17 points in F1.