Towards a One-stop Solution to Both Aspect Extraction and Sentiment Analysis Tasks with Neural Multi-task Learning

Previous studies usually divided aspect-based sentiment analysis into several subtasks in pipeline, i.e., first aspect term and/or opinion term extraction, then aspect-based sentiment prediction, resulting in error propagation and external resources dependency. To overcome the problems mentioned above, in this work we present a novel one-stop solution on aspect-based sentiment analysis. Specifically, we propose a novel multi-task neural learning framework to jointly tackle aspect extraction and sentiment prediction subtasks at the same time, and leverage attention mechanisms to learn the joint representation of aspect-sentiment relationship. We have conducted extensive comparative experiments on two benchmark datasets from SemEval-2014. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Especially, our multi-task model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on aspect extraction subtask.