A Self-Attentive Hierarchical Model for Jointly Improving Text Summarization and Sentiment Classification

Text summarization and sentiment classification, in NLP, are two main tasks implemented on text analysis, focusing on extracting the major idea of a text at different levels. Based on the characteristics of both, sentiment classification can be regarded as a more abstrac- tive summarization task. According to the scheme, a Self-Attentive Hierarchical model for jointly improving text Summarization and Sentiment Classification (SAHSSC) is proposed in this paper. This model jointly performs abstractive text summarization and sentiment classification within a hierarchical end-to-end neural framework, in which the sentiment classification layer on top of the summarization layer predicts the sentiment label in the light of the text and the generated summary. Furthermore, a self-attention layer is also pro- posed in the hierarchical framework, which is the bridge that connects the summarization layer and the sentiment classification layer and aims at capturing emotional information at text-level as well as summary-level. The proposed model can generate a more relevant summary and lead to a more accurate summary-aware sentiment prediction. Experimental results evaluated on SNAP amazon online review datasets show that our model outper- forms the state-of-the-art baselines on both abstractive text summarization and sentiment classification by a considerable margin.