OTESGN:Optimal Transport Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify aspect terms and determine their sentiment polarity. While dependency trees combined with contextual semantics effectively identify aspect sentiment, existing methods relying on syntax trees and aspect-aware attention struggle to model complex semantic relationships. Their dependence on linear dot-product features fails to capture nonlinear associations, allowing noisy similarity from irrelevant words to obscure key opinion terms. Motivated by Differentiable Optimal Matching, we propose the Optimal Transport Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Network (OTESGN), which introduces a Syntactic-Semantic Collaborative Attention. It comprises a Syntactic Graph-Aware Attention for mining latent syntactic dependencies and modeling global syntactic topology, as well as a Semantic Optimal Transport Attention designed to uncover fine-grained semantic alignments amidst textual noise, thereby accurately capturing sentiment signals obscured by irrelevant tokens. A Adaptive Attention Fusion module integrates these heterogeneous features, and contrastive regularization further improves robustness. Experiments demonstrate that OTESGN achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming previous best models by +1.01% F1 on Twitter and +1.30% F1 on Laptop14 benchmarks. Ablative studies and visual analyses corroborate its efficacy in precise localization of opinion words and noise resistance.