Graph convolutional networks with hierarchical multi-head attention for aspect-level sentiment classification

J Supercomput. 2022;78(13):14846-14865. doi: 10.1007/s11227-022-04480-w. Epub 2022 Apr 9.

Abstract

Aspect-level sentiment classification has been widely used by researchers as a fine-grained sentiment classification task to predict the sentiment polarity of specific aspect words in a given sentence. Previous studies have shown relatively good experimental results using graph convolutional networks, so more and more approaches are beginning to exploit sentence structure information for this task. However, these methods do not link aspect word and context well. To address this problem, we propose a method that utilizes a hierarchical multi-head attention mechanism and a graph convolutional network (MHAGCN). It fully considers syntactic dependencies and combines semantic information to achieve interaction between aspect words and context. To fully validate the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, which, according to the experimental results, show that the method outperforms current methods.

Keywords: Aspect-level sentiment classification; Attention mechanism; Deep learning; Graph convolutional network.