Automatic Construction of an Annotated Corpus with Implicit Aspects

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a task that involves classifying the polarity of aspects of the products or services described in users’ reviews. Most previous work on ABSA has focused on explicit aspects, which appear as explicit words or phrases in the sentences of the review. However, users often express their opinions toward the aspects indirectly or implicitly, in which case the specific name of an aspect does not appear in the review. The current datasets used for ABSA are mainly annotated with explicit aspects. This paper proposes a novel method for constructing a corpus that is automatically annotated with implicit aspects. The main idea is that sentences containing explicit and implicit aspects share a similar context. First, labeled sentences with explicit aspects and unlabeled sentences that include implicit aspects are collected. Next, clustering is performed on these sentences so that similar sentences are merged into the same cluster. Finally, the explicit aspects are propagated to the unlabeled sentences in the same cluster, in order to construct a labeled dataset containing implicit aspects. The results of our experiments on mobile phone reviews show that our method of identifying the labels of implicit aspects achieves a maximum accuracy of 82%.