MemNetAR: Memory Network with Adversative Relation for Target-Level Sentiment Classification

Yiwei Gao, Jianwei Niu, Xuefeng Liu, Kaili Mao, Shui Yu

Abstract: Target-level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment of multiple targets in a sentence. Although existing approaches based on neural network have achieved good performance in this task, we find that many approaches tend to give the same predictions for instances that have multiple targets, and this tendency can make a low accuracy for those instances that have different classes for different targets. Based on this observation, we propose MemNetAR, a memory network which can explicitly leverage the adversative relation among multiple targets in a sentence. Specifically, we add an adversative loss to the cross-entropy loss when there are adversative words between targets. The experimental results on public laptop and restaurant datasets prove that our model can improve 0.84% and 0.8% on total test dataset, and improve 2.97% and 2.68% on the dataset consisting of those instances with multiple targets but different classes by leveraging this new adversative information.