Hidden Topic Sentiment Model

Md. Mustafizur Rahman, Hongning Wang

Abstract: Various topic models have been developed for sentiment analysis tasks. But the simple topic-sentiment mixture assumption prohibits them from finding fine-grained dependency between topical aspects and sentiments. In this paper, we build a Hidden Topic Sentiment Model (HTSM) to explicitly capture topic coherence and sentiment consistency in an opinionated text document to accurately extract latent aspects and corresponding sentiment polarities. In HTSM, 1) topic coherence is achieved by enforcing words in the same sentence to share the same topic assignment and modeling topic transition between successive sentences; 2) sentiment consistency is imposed by constraining topic transitions via tracking sentiment changes; and 3) both topic transition and sentiment transition are guided by a parameterized logistic function based on the linguistic signals directly observable in a document. Extensive experiments on four categories of product reviews from both Amazon and NewEgg validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.