Investigating the Saliency of Sentiment Expressions in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Joachim Wagner, Jennifer Foster

Abstract: We examine the behaviour of an aspect-based sentiment classifier built by fine-tuning the BERT BASE model on the SemEval 2016 English dataset. In a set of masking experiments, we examine the extent to which the tokens identified as salient by LIME and a gradient-based method are being used by the classifier. We find that both methods are able to produce faithful rationales, with LIME outperforming the gradient-based method. We also identify a set of manually annotated sentiment expressions for this dataset, and carry out more masking experiments with these as human rationales. The enhanced performance of a classifier that only sees the relevant sentiment expressions suggests that they are not being used to their full potential. A comparison of the LIME and gradient rationales with the sentiment expressions reveals only a moderate level of agreement. Some disagreements are related to the fixed length of the rationales and the tendency of the rationales to contain content words related to the aspect itself.