A Hierarchical End-to-End Model for Jointly Improving Text Summarization and Sentiment Classification

A Hierarchical End-to-End Model for Jointly Improving Text Summarization and Sentiment Classification

Shuming Ma, Xu Sun, Junyang Lin, Xuancheng Ren

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4251-4257. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/591

Text summarization and sentiment classification both aim to capture the main ideas of the text but at different levels. Text summarization is to describe the text within a few sentences, while sentiment classification can be regarded as a special type of summarization which ``summarizes'' the text into a even more abstract fashion, i.e., a sentiment class. Based on this idea, we propose a hierarchical end-to-end model for joint learning of text summarization and sentiment classification, where the sentiment classification label is treated as the further ``summarization'' of the text summarization output. Hence, the sentiment classification layer is put upon the text summarization layer, and a hierarchical structure is derived. Experimental results on Amazon online reviews datasets show that our model achieves better performance than the strong baseline systems on both abstractive summarization and sentiment classification.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Summarization
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining
Natural Language Processing: Text Classification