Knowledge-Guided Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

The purpose of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is to determine the sentiment polarity of aspects in a given sentence. Most historical works on sentiment analysis used complex and inefficient methods to integrate external knowledge. Furthermore, they fell short of completely utilizing BERT’s potential because when trying to generate word embeddings, they merely averaged the BERT subword vectors. To overcome these limitations, we propose a knowledge-guided heterogeneous graph convolutional network for aspect-based sentiment analysis (KHGCN). Specifically, we consider merging subword vectors utilizing a dynamic weight mechanism in the BERT embedding layer. Additionally, heterogeneous graphs are constructed to fuse different feature associations between words, and graph convolutional networks are utilized to identify context-specific syntactic features. Furthermore, by embedding a knowledge graph, the model can learn additional features from sources other than the corpus. Based on this knowledge, it is consequently possible to obtain more knowledge representation for a particular aspect by utilizing the attention mechanism. Last but not least, semantic features, syntactic features, and knowledge are dynamically combined using feature fusion. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our model achieves accuracy rates of 80.87%, 85.42%, and 91.07%, which is an improvement of more than 2% compared to other benchmark models based on HGCNs and BERT.