Semantic-syntactic graph network for aspect-based sentiment analysis

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that identifies sentiment polarities toward specific aspects within a sentence. While conventional models have achieved progress, they often neglect to jointly consider both semantic context and syntactic structure, limiting performance in complex linguistic scenarios. Nevertheless, most existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based approaches have recently focused on either semantic or syntactic information individually, leading to suboptimal sentiment classification accuracy. Hence, this work aims to design an effective ABSA model that simultaneously captures both semantic relationships and syntactic dependencies for enhanced aspect-level sentiment analysis. For solving issues of GCN-based approaches, this work proposed a model called sentiment semantic syntactic network (SentSemSynNet), which constructs a unified graph by integrating semantic and syntactic features and applies graph neural networks to learn rich, aspect-specific representations. The model was evaluated on the SemEval2014 restaurant and laptop datasets. It achieved 88.25% accuracy and 82.95% macro-F-score for restaurant, and 84.52% accuracy and 80.26% macro-F-score for laptop. The model’s unique integration of both semantic and syntactic importance through a unified graph structure improved sentiment detection accuracy.