QPLSA: Utilizing quad-tuples for aspect identification and rating

• We propose two novel aspect rating prediction approaches, i.e., Quad-tuple prediction and Expectation prediction.
• We analyze and investigate the performance of the proposed aspect rating prediction methods in contrast with Local Prediction and Global Prediction.
• We experimentally inspect the influence of aspect rating variance for different rating prediction approaches.

Aspect level sentiment analysis is important for numerous opinion mining and market analysis applications. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying and rating review aspects, which is the fundamental task in aspect level sentiment analysis. Previous review aspect analysis methods seldom consider entity or rating but only 2-tuples, i.e., head and modifier pair, e.g., in the phrase “nice room”, “room” is the head and “nice” is the modifier. To solve this problem, we novelly present a Quad-tuple Probability Latent Semantic Analysis (QPLSA), which incorporates entity and its rating together with the 2-tuples into the PLSA model. Specifically, QPLSA not only generates fine-granularity aspects, but also captures the correlations between words and ratings. We also develop two novel prediction approaches, the Quad-tuple Prediction (from the global perspective) and the Expectation Prediction (from the local perspective). For evaluation, systematic experiments show that: Quad-tuple PLSA outperforms 2-tuple PLSA significantly on both aspect identification and aspect rating prediction for publication datasets. Moreover, for aspect rating prediction, QPLSA shows significant superiority over state-of-the-art baseline methods. Besides, the Quad-tuple Prediction and the Expectation Prediction also show their strong ability in aspect rating on different datasets.