Multi-Entity Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Context, Entity, Aspect Memory and Dependency Information

Fine-grained sentiment analysis is a useful tool for producers to understand consumers' needs as well as complaints about products and related aspects from online platforms. In this article, we define a novel task named "Multi-Entity Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ME-ABSA)". It investigates the sentiment towards entities and their related aspects. It makes the well-studied aspect-based sentiment analysis a special case of this type, where the number of entities is limited to one. We contribute a new dataset for this task, with multi-entity Chinese posts in it. We propose to model context, entity, and aspect memory to address the task and incorporate dependency information for further improvement. Experiments show that our methods perform significantly better than baseline methods on datasets for both ME-ABSA task and ABSA task. The in-depth analysis further validates the effectiveness of our methods and shows that our methods are capable of generalizing to new (entity, aspect) combinations with little loss of accuracy. This observation indicates that data annotation in real applications can be largely simplified.