Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis on the Web Using Rhetorical Structure Theory

Fine-grained sentiment analysis on the Web has received much attention in recent years. In this paper we suggest an approach to Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis that incorporates structural information of reviews by employing Rhetorical Structure Theory. First, a novel way of determining the context of an aspect is presented, after which a full path analysis is performed on the found context tree to determine the aspect sentiment. Comparing the proposed method to a baseline model, which does not use the discourse structure of the text and solely relies on a sentiment lexicon to assign sentiments, we find that the proposed method consistently outperforms the baseline on three different datasets.