Dual-channel relative position guided attention networks for aspect-based sentiment analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to match sentiment tendencies for different aspects of a sentence to understand the product experience of the user. It is a pressing challenge for existing ABSA methods to synthesize sentences’ semantic relevance and syntactic dependency for more comprehensive sentiment representations. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Channel Relative Position Guided Attention Network (Dual-RPGA). Dual-RPGA deeply learns semantic and syntactic representations of sentiment to provide reliable knowledge for dynamic fusion and prediction of sentiment. First, we design a syntactic graph attention network (Syn-GAT) to learn the syntactic relative position between aspect and context, which guides the sentiment syntactic representation. Then, we build a semantic attention network (Sem-Attention). It computes semantic attention and similarity coefficients for aspects and contexts to enhance sentiment semantic expressions. Finally, we design a fusion network (Bi-Fusion) that realizes dynamic feature interactions of sentiment semantics and syntactics to perform sentiment prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on two groups of datasets to validate the performance of Dual-RPGA on the ABSA task. The results show that Dual-RPGA outperforms the optimal baseline by 0.58%∼1.49% of the Acc score, which verifies that Dual-RPGA performs better on the ABSA task. •We propose a dual-channel relative position-guided attention ABSA method.•We design Sem-Attention to enhance the semantic link between aspect and context.•We utilize syntactic graph attention network to learn relative positional features.