A Context-focused Attention Evolution Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification

Due to their inherent capability in the semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, Attention and Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) mechanisms are widely adopted for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification (ABSC) tasks. Instead, it is challenging to handle long-range word dependencies on multiple entities due to the deficiency in attention mechanisms. To solve this problem, we propose a Context-Focused Aspect-Based Network to align attention before LSTM, making the model focus more on aspect-related words and ignore irrelevant words, improving the accuracy of final classification. This can either alleviate attention distraction or reinforce the text representation ability. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that the results achieve respectable performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods available in ABSC. Our approach has the potential to improve classification accuracy by adaptively adjusting the focus on context.