Affective-Knowledge-Enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Multi-Head Attention

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves predicting the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in text. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective tools for sentiment analysis tasks, but current research often overlooks affective information in the text, leading to irrelevant information being learned for specific aspects. To address this issue, we propose a novel GNN model, MHAKE-GCN, which is based on the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) and multi-head attention (MHA). Our model incorporates external sentiment knowledge into the GCN and fully extracts semantic and syntactic information from a sentence using MHA. By adding weights to sentiment words associated with aspect words, our model can better learn sentiment expressions related to specific aspects. Our model was evaluated on four publicly benchmark datasets and compared against twelve other methods. The results of the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the task of aspect-based sentiment analysis.