Aspect opinion expression and rating prediction via LDA–CRF hybrid

In this paper, we study the problem of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Our model simultaneously extracts aspect-specific opinion expressions and determines the rating for each aspect in reviews. Previous works have mainly focused on the problem of opinion phrase extraction and aspect rating prediction in a pipelined manner and are not able to capture the dependencies of aspect opinion expression on aspect rating and vice-versa. They are also unable to discover aspect-specific opinion expressions and their associated rating scores. We present a joint modelling approach to extract aspect-specific sentiment expression and aspect rating prediction simultaneously. This paper proposes a novel LDA–CRF hybrid model which employs discriminative conditional random field component for phrase extraction, a regression component for rating prediction and a generative component for grouping aspect–sentiment expressions (aspect-specific opinion expressions) into coherent topics. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate the performance of the model on both task: (i) aspect-specific opinion expressions and (ii) rating prediction on the dataset of hotel and restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor.com. Experimental results show that both task potentially reinforce each other and joint modeling outperformed state-of-the-art baselines for each individual tasks.