# Aspect-oriented Opinion Alignment Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11447 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11447/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Interactive Attention Networks for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00893/) (2017)
- [Effective LSTMs for Target-Dependent Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01100/) (2015)
- [Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Deep Memory Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08900/) (2016)
- [Aspect-based Sentiment Classification with Aspect-specific Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03477/) (2019)
- [Attentional Encoder Network for Targeted Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09314/) (2019)
- [Transformation Networks for Target-Oriented Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01086/) (2018)
- [Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Attention-over-Attention Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06536/) (2018)
- [BERT4GCN: Using BERT Intermediate Layers to Augment GCN for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00171/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Are LLM Agents Behaviorally Coherent? Latent Profiles for Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03736/) (2025)
- [DiffuSent: Towards a Unified Diffusion Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01323/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect-based sentiment classification is a crucial problem in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims to predict the sentiment polarity of the given aspect according to its context. Previous works have made remarkable progress in leveraging attention mechanism to extract opinion words for different aspects. However, a persistent challenge is the effective management of semantic mismatches, which stem from attention mechanisms that fall short in adequately aligning opinions words with their corresponding aspect in multi-aspect sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel Aspect-oriented Opinion Alignment Network (AOAN) to capture the contextual association between opinion words and the corresponding aspect. Specifically, we first introduce a neighboring span enhanced module which highlights various compositions of neighboring words and given aspects. In addition, we design a multi-perspective attention mechanism that align relevant opinion information with respect to the given aspect. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results. The source code is available at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/ABSA-AOAN.