Syntax-Directed Hybrid Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-level sentiment analysis is a fine-grained task in sentiment analysis that aims at detecting sentiment polarity towards a specific target in a sentence. Previous studies focus on using global attention mechanism that attends to all words in the context to model the interaction between target and sentence. However, global attention suffers from assigning high-attention score to irrelevant sentiment words in the cases where sentence contains noisy words or multiple targets. To address this problem, we propose a novel syntax-directed hybrid attention network (SHAN). In SHAN, a global attention is employed to capture coarse information about the target, and a syntax-directed local attention is used to take a look at words syntactically close to the target. An information gate is then utilized to synthesize the information from local and global attention results and adaptively generate a less-noisy and more sentiment-oriented representation. The experimental results on SemEval 2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.