Integrating word status for joint detection of sentiment and aspect in reviews

A crucial task in sentiment analysis is aspect detection: the step of selecting the aspects on which opinions are expressed. This step anticipates the step of determining whether the opinions on aspects are positive or negative. This article proposes a novel probabilistic generative topic model for aspect-based sentiment analysis which is able to discover the latent structure of a large collection of review documents. The proposed joint sentiment-aspect detection model (SAM) is a generative topic model that incorporates the structure of review sentences for detecting aspects and sentiments simultaneously. The intuitions behind the SAM are that from generating documents by latent single- and multi-word topics, modelling the word distribution for each topic and learning of the prior distribution over topics in sentences of documents. SAM introduces word status so that the model can decide when to sample from a bigram distribution or a unigram distribution and integrates all these components into one combined model for aspect-based sentiment analysis. We evaluate SAM both qualitatively and quantitatively to show that the model is indeed able to perform the task effectively and improves significantly over standard joint sentiment-aspect models. The proposed model can easily be transformed between domains or languages and can detect the polarity of text data at various levels. However, for the quantitative analysis, we mainly focus on presenting the results for the document-level sentiment classification.