Incorporating Multi-Level User Preference into Document-Level Sentiment Classification

Document-level sentiment classification aims to predict a user’s sentiment polarity in a document about a product. Most existing methods only focus on review contents and ignore users who post reviews. In fact, when reviewing a product, different users have different word-using habits to express opinions (i.e., word-level user preference), care about different attributes of the product (i.e., aspect-level user preference), and have different characteristics to score the review (i.e., polarity-level user preference). These preferences have great influence on interpreting the sentiment of text. To address this issue, we propose a model called Hierarchical User Attention Network (HUAN), which incorporates multi-level user preference into a hierarchical neural network to perform document-level sentiment classification. Specifically, HUAN encodes different kinds of information (word, sentence, aspect, and document) in a hierarchical structure and imports user embedding and user attention mechanism to model these preferences. Empirical results on two real-world datasets show that HUAN achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, HUAN can also mine important attributes of products for different users.