SK-GCN: Modeling Syntax and Knowledge via Graph Convolutional Network for aspect-level sentiment classification

Aspect-level sentiment classification is a fundamental subtask of fine-grained sentiment analysis. The syntactic information and commonsense knowledge are important and useful for aspect-level sentiment classification, while only a limited number of studies have explored to incorporate them via flexible graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) for this task. In this paper, we propose a new Syntax- and Knowledge-based Graph Convolutional Network (SK-GCN) model for aspect-level sentiment classification, which leverages the syntactic dependency tree and commonsense knowledge via GCN. In particular, to enhance the representation of the sentence toward the given aspect, we develop two strategies to model the syntactic dependency tree and commonsense knowledge graph, namely SK-GCN¹ and SK-GCN² respectively. SK-GCN¹ models the dependency tree and knowledge graph via Syntax-based GCN (S-GCN) and Knowledge-based GCN (K-GCN) independently, and SK-GCN² models them jointly. We also apply pre-trained BERT to this task and obtain new state-of-the-art results. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach can effectively improve the performance of aspect-level sentiment classification compared with the state-of-the-art methods.