Papers › Attentional Encoder Network for Targeted Sentiment Classification

Attentional Encoder Network for Targeted Sentiment Classification

25 Feb 2019arXiv:1902.09314archive 2025-07-28

Youwei Song, Jiahai Wang, Tao Jiang, Zhiyue Liu, Yanghui Rao

Targeted sentiment classification aims at determining the sentimental tendency towards specific targets. Most of the previous approaches model context and target words with RNN and attention. However, RNNs are difficult to parallelize and truncated backpropagation through time brings difficulty in remembering long-term patterns. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Attentional Encoder Network (AEN) which eschews recurrence and employs attention based encoders for the modeling between context and target. We raise the label unreliability issue and introduce label smoothing regularization. We also apply pre-trained BERT to this task and obtain new state-of-the-art results. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and lightweight of our model.

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Code

songyouwei/ABSA-PyTorch officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
Ankur3107/awesome-daily-blog mentioned on GitHubtf report
mindspore-courses/ABSA-MindSpore mentioned on GitHubmindsporenot reachable when probed 2026-09-17 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report
recommeddit/labs mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
yangheng95/LC-ABSA mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA)ClassificationGeneral ClassificationSentiment AnalysisSentiment Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 BERT-SPC Laptop (Acc) 78.99 #15 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 BERT-SPC Mean Acc (Restaurant + Laptop) 81.73 #15 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 BERT-SPC Restaurant (Acc) 84.46 #15 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-BERT Laptop (Acc) 79.93 #16 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-BERT Mean Acc (Restaurant + Laptop) 81.53 #16 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-BERT Restaurant (Acc) 83.12 #16 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-GloVe Laptop (Acc) 73.51 #33 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-GloVe Mean Acc (Restaurant + Laptop) 77.25 #33 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) SemEval-2014 Task-4 AEN-GloVe Restaurant (Acc) 80.98 #33 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis Twitter AEN-BERT Accuracy 74.71 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis Twitter BERT-SPC Accuracy 73.55 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis Twitter AEN-GloVe Accuracy 72.83 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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