Recurrent Attention Network on Memory for Aspect Sentiment Analysis

We propose a novel framework based on neural networks to identify the sentiment of opinion targets in a comment/review. Our framework adopts multiple-attention mechanism to capture sentiment features separated by a long distance, so that it is more robust against irrelevant information. The results of multiple attentions are non-linearly combined with a recurrent neural network, which strengthens the expressive power of our model for handling more complications. The weightedmemory mechanism not only helps us avoid the labor-intensive feature engineering work, but also provides a tailor-made memory for different opinion targets of a sentence. We examine the merit of our model on four datasets: two are from Se-mEval2014, i.e. reviews of restaurants and laptops; a twitter dataset, for testing its performance on social media data; and a Chinese news comment dataset, for testing its language sensitivity. The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different types of data.