Incorporating syntax and semantics with dual graph neural networks for aspect-level sentiment analysis

Aspect-level sentiment analysis is a more fine-grained task that aims to determine the sentiment polarity of specific aspects. Recent studies have employed graph attention networks and graph convolutional networks to model dependency trees, effectively establishing explicit associations between aspects and opinions, yielding promising performance. However, these methods have limitations in capturing complex linguistic features and the intricate dependencies between aspects and their contexts, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a dual graph neural network that incorporates syntax and semantics, called IDGNN. Specifically, we utilize the relational graph attention network (RGAT) to encode the syntactic dependency tree and obtain syntactic information, while incorporating dependency labels to enhance aspect representation. Additionally, the semantic graph convolutional network (SemGCN) is employed to encode the self-attention matrix and capture semantic information, with the inclusion of orthogonal regularization to enhance semantic association. Furthermore, we introduce two fusion strategies based on gate mechanisms: the syntax fusion module (SYF) and the semantic fusion module (SEF). SYF combines contextual and syntactic representations to obtain global syntactic features, while SEF fuses semantic information with global syntactic features to obtain the final feature representation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets.