A Convolutional Neural Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification

Sentiment analysis, including aspect-level sentiment classification, is an important basic natural language processing (NLP) task. Aspect-level sentiment can provide complete and in-depth results. Words with different contexts variably influence the aspect-level sentiment polarity of sentences, and polarity varies based on different aspects of a sentence. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are regarded as effective models for handling NLP and have performed well in aspect-level sentiment classification. Extensive literature exists on sentiment classification that utilizes convolutional neural networks (CNNs); however, no literature on aspect-level sentiment classification that uses CNNs is available. In the present study, we develop a CNN model for handling aspect-level sentiment classification. In our model, attention-based input layers are incorporated into CNN to introduce aspect information. In our experiment, in which a benchmark dataset from Twitter is compared with other models, incorporating aspect information into CNN improves aspect-level sentiment classification performance without using syntactic parser or other language features.