A New Semantic Relations-Based Hybrid Approach for Implicit Aspect Identification in Sentiment Analysis

Within the next few years, sentiment analysis or opinion mining is set to become an important component of real-world applications for product manufacturers, e-commerce companies, and potential customers. Sentiment analysis deals with the computational assessment of people’s opinions apparent or hidden within the text according to three levels: document, sentence and aspect levels. The aspect-level is increasingly becoming an active phase of sentiment analysis. At this level, the aim is to determine the hidden target of opinion represented in datasets, known as aspect term identification. This paper proposes an original hybrid model combining semantic relations and frequency-based approach with supervised classifiers for implicit aspect identification (IAI). The proposed approach is directed towards improving the F1-performances for traditional supervised classifiers commonly used in this field based on eager and lazy learning, and deep learning technique using long short-term memory whit attention mechanism applied for IAI. Particularly, this work addresses aspect term extraction and aggregation, the two sub-tasks of IAI, involving adjectives and verbs. The effects of this approach are empirically examined on multiple datasets of electronic products and restaurant reviews with multiple aspect granularity levels. Comparing this method with similar approaches clearly shows the benefits of this method: (i) the use of an appropriately selected WordNet semantic relations of adjectives and verbs that significantly helps classifiers for IAI. (ii) Using the hybrid model helps classifiers better handle these selected WordNet semantic relations and therefore deal better with IAI.