Supervised Opinion Aspect Extraction by Exploiting Past Extraction Results

One of the key tasks of sentiment analysis of product reviews is to extract product aspects or features that users have expressed opinions on. In this work, we focus on using supervised sequence labeling as the base approach to performing the task. Although several extraction methods using sequence labeling methods such as Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) have been proposed, we show that this supervised approach can be significantly improved by exploiting the idea of concept sharing across multiple domains. For example, "screen" is an aspect in iPhone, but not only iPhone has a screen, many electronic devices have screens too. When "screen" appears in a review of a new domain (or product), it is likely to be an aspect too. Knowing this information enables us to do much better extraction in the new domain. This paper proposes a novel extraction method exploiting this idea in the context of supervised sequence labeling. Experimental results show that it produces markedly better results than without using the past information.