A dependency syntactic knowledge augmented interactive architecture for end-to-end aspect-based sentiment analysis

The end-to-end aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task remains to be a long-standing challenge, which aims to extract the aspect term and then identify its sentiment orientation. In previous approaches, the explicit syntactic structure of a sentence, which reflects the syntax properties of natural language and hence is intuitively crucial for aspect term extraction and sentiment recognition, is insufficiently modeled. In this paper, we thus propose a novel dependency syntactic knowledge augmented interactive architecture with multi-task learning for end-to-end ABSA. This model is capable of fully exploiting the syntactic knowledge (dependency relations and types) by leveraging a well-designed Dependency Relation Embedded Graph Convolutional Network. Additionally, we design a simple yet effective message-passing mechanism to ensure that our model learns from multiple related tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art method. Besides, we achieve further improvements by using BERT as an additional feature extractor.