Lexicon-Enhanced Attention Network Based on Text Representation for Sentiment Classification

Text representation learning is an important but challenging issue for various natural language processing tasks. Recently, deep learning-based representation models have achieved great success for sentiment classification. However, these existing models focus on more semantic information rather than sentiment linguistic knowledge, which provides rich sentiment information and plays a key role in sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a lexicon-enhanced attention network (LAN) based on text representation to improve the performance of sentiment classification. Specifically, we first propose a lexicon-enhanced attention mechanism by combining the sentiment lexicon with an attention mechanism to incorporate sentiment linguistic knowledge into deep learning methods. Second, we introduce a multi-head attention mechanism in the deep neural network to interactively capture the contextual information from different representation subspaces at different positions. Furthermore, we stack a LAN model to build a hierarchical sentiment classification model for large-scale text. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed models on four popular real-world sentiment classification datasets at both the sentence level and the document level. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed models can achieve comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.