Phrase dependency relational graph attention network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a subclass of sentiment analysis, which aims to identify the sentiment polarity such as positive, negative, or neutral for specific aspects or attributes that appear in a sentence. Previous studies have focused on extracting aspect-sentiment polarity pairs based on dependency trees, ignoring edge labels and phrase information. In this paper, we instead propose a phrase dependency graph attention network (PD-RGAT) on the ABSA task, which is a relational graph attention network constructed based on the phrase dependency graph, aggregating directed dependency edges and phrase information. We perform experiments with two pre-training models, GloVe and BERT. Experimental results on the benchmarking datasets (i.e., Twitter, Restaurant, and Laptop) demonstrate that our proposed PD-RGAT has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models and further illustrate that the graph convolutional structure based on the phrase dependency graph can capture both syntactic information and short long-range word dependencies. It also shows that incorporating directed edge labels and phrase information can enhance the capture of aspect-sentiment polarities on the ABSA task.