Mastering the Explicit Opinion-Role Interaction: Syntax-Aided Neural Transition System for Unified Opinion Role Labeling

Unified opinion role labeling (ORL) aims to detect all possible opinion structures of 'opinion-holder-target' in one shot, given a text. The existing transition-based unified method, unfortunately, is subject to longer opinion terms and fails to solve the term overlap issue. Current top performance has been achieved by employing the span-based graph model, which however still suffers from both high model complexity and insufficient interaction among opinions and roles. In this work, we investigate a novel solution by revisiting the transition architecture, and augmenting it with a pointer network (PointNet). The framework parses out all opinion structures in linear-time complexity, meanwhile breaks through the limitation of any length of terms with PointNet. To achieve the explicit opinion-role interactions, we further propose a unified dependency-opinion graph (UDOG), co-modeling the syntactic dependency structure and the partial opinion-role structure. We then devise a relation-centered graph aggregator (RCGA) to encode the multi-relational UDOG, where the resulting high-order representations are used to promote the predictions in the vanilla transition system. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the MPQA benchmark. Analyses further demonstrate the superiority of our methods on both efficacy and efficiency.