Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis With Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

—Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to predict sen- timent polarities of given aspects in text. Most current approaches employ attention-based neural methods to capture semantic rela- tionships between aspects and words in one sentence. However, these methods ignore the fact that sentences with the same aspect and sentiment polarity often share the structure and semantic information in a domain, which leads to lower model perfor- mance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a heterogeneous aspect graph neural network (HAGNN) to learn the structure and semantic knowledge from intersentence relationships. Our model is a heterogeneous graph neural network since it contains three different kinds of nodes: word nodes, aspect nodes, and sentence nodes. These nodes can pass structure and semantic information between each other and update their embeddings to improve the performance of our model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the ﬁrst to use a heterogeneous graph to capture relationships between sentences and aspects. The experimental results on ﬁve public datasets show the effectiveness of our model outperforming some state-of-the-art models.