Dynamic Span Interaction and Graph-Aware Memory for Entity-Level Sentiment Classification

Abstract

Entity-level sentiment classification involves identifying the sentiment polarity linked to specific entities within text. This task poses several challenges: effectively modeling the subtle and complex interactions between entities and their surrounding sentiment expressions; capturing dependencies that may span across sentences; and ensuring consistent sentiment predictions for multiple mentions of the same entity through coreference resolution. Additionally, linguistic phenomena such as negation, ambiguity, and overlapping opinions further complicate the analysis. These complexities make entity-level sentiment classification a difficult problem, especially in real-world, noisy textual data. To address these issues, we propose SpanEIT, a novel framework integrating dynamic span interaction and graph-aware memory mechanisms for enhanced entity-sentiment relational modeling. SpanEIT builds span-based representations for entities and candidate sentiment phrases, employs bidirectional attention for fine-grained interactions, and uses a graph attention network to capture syntactic and co-occurrence relations. A coreference-aware memory module ensures entity-level consistency across documents. Experiments on FSAD, BARU, and IMDB datasets show SpanEIT outperforms state-of-the-art transformer and hybrid baselines in accuracy and F1 scores. Ablation and interpretability analyses validate the effectiveness of our approach, underscoring its potential for fine-grained sentiment analysis in applications like social media monitoring and customer feedback analysis.