Aspect extraction is an important task in sentiment analysis. Topic modeling is a popular method for the task. However, unsupervised topic models often generate incoherent aspects. To address the issue, several knowledge-based models have been proposed to incorporate prior knowledge provided by the user to guide modeling. In this paper, we take a major step forward and show that in the big data era, without any user input, it is possible to learn prior knowledge automatically from a large amount of review data available on the Web. Such knowledge can then be used by a topic model to discover more coherent aspects. There are two key challenges: (1) learning quality knowledge from reviews of diverse domains, and (2) making the model fault-tolerant to handle possibly wrong knowledge. A novel approach is proposed to solve these problems. Experimental results using reviews from 36 domains show that the proposed approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.
An unsupervised approach for aspect extraction proposed in REF learns prior knowledge from big data of reviews available on the web.
Aspect Extraction with Automated Prior Knowledge Learning
ACL
Computer Science