A Bayesian Model for Joint Unsupervised Induction of Sentiment, Aspect and Discourse Representations

We propose a joint model for unsupervised induction of sentiment, aspect and discourse information and show that by incorporating a notion of latent discourse relations in the model, we improve the prediction accuracy for aspect and sentiment polarity on the sub-sentential level. We deviate from the traditional view of discourse, as we induce types of discourse relations and associated discourse cues relevant to the considered opinion analysis task; consequently, the induced discourse relations play the role of opinion and aspect shifters. The quantitative analysis that we conducted indicated that the integration of a discourse model increased the prediction accuracy results with respect to the discourse-agnostic approach and the qualitative analysis suggests that the induced representations encode a meaningful discourse structure.