Multi-aspect Sentiment Analysis with Topic Models

Abstract

We investigate the efficacy of topic model based approaches to two multi-aspect sentiment analysis tasks: multi-aspect sentence labeling and multi-aspect rating prediction. For sentence labeling, we propose a weakly-supervised approach that utilizes only minimal prior knowledge -- in the form of seed words -- to enforce a direct correspondence between topics and aspects. This correspondence is used to label sentences with performance that approaches a fully supervised baseline. For multi-aspect rating prediction, we find that overall ratings can be used in conjunction with our sentence labelings to achieve reasonable performance compared to a fully supervised baseline. When gold-standard aspect-ratings are available, we find that topic model based features can be used to improve unsophisticated supervised baseline performance, in agreement with previous multi-aspect rating prediction work. This improvement is diminished, however, when topic model features are paired with a more competitive supervised baseline -- a finding not acknowledged in previous work.