Aspect Extraction with Automated Prior Knowledge Learning

Aspect extraction is an important task in sentiment analysis. Topic modeling is a popular method for the task. However, unsupervised topic models often generate incoherent aspects. To address the issue, several knowledge-based models have been proposed to incorporate prior knowledge provided by the user to guide modeling. In this paper, we take a major step forward and show that in the big data era, without any user input, it is possible to learn prior knowledge automatically from a large amount of review data available on the Web. Such knowledge can then be used by a topic model to discover more coherent aspects. There are two key challenges: (1) learning quality knowledge from reviews of diverse domains, and (2) making the model fault-tolerant to handle possibly wrong knowledge. A novel approach is proposed to solve these problems. Experimental results using reviews from 36 domains show that the proposed approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.