Learning to Generate Product Reviews from Attributes

Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei, Mirella Lapata, Ming Zhou, Ke Xu


Abstract
Automatically generating product reviews is a meaningful, yet not well-studied task in sentiment analysis. Traditional natural language generation methods rely extensively on hand-crafted rules and predefined templates. This paper presents an attention-enhanced attribute-to-sequence model to generate product reviews for given attribute information, such as user, product, and rating. The attribute encoder learns to represent input attributes as vectors. Then, the sequence decoder generates reviews by conditioning its output on these vectors. We also introduce an attention mechanism to jointly generate reviews and align words with input attributes. The proposed model is trained end-to-end to maximize the likelihood of target product reviews given the attributes. We build a publicly available dataset for the review generation task by leveraging the Amazon book reviews and their metadata. Experiments on the dataset show that our approach outperforms baseline methods and the attention mechanism significantly improves the performance of our model.
Anthology ID:
E17-1059
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
623–632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1059
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei, Mirella Lapata, Ming Zhou, and Ke Xu. 2017. Learning to Generate Product Reviews from Attributes. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 623–632, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Generate Product Reviews from Attributes (Dong et al., EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1059.pdf