Bayesian Biaffine Variational Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the sentiment polarity expressed toward a specific aspect in a sentence. Existing sequential and Transformer-based methods can effectively capture contextual semantics, but they often lack explicit modeling of aspect–opinion relations. Graph-based approaches partially address this limitation by incorporating syntactic dependency structures; however, most rely on deterministic parser-derived graphs or fixed relation weights, which may introduce noisy edges and unstable message propagation for ambiguous, informal, or domain-shifted text. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Bayesian Biaffine Variational Graph Convolutional Network (BBV-GCN) for ABSA. Specifically, a contextual encoder first generates token-level representations for each sentence–aspect pair. A biaffine relation scorer then estimates aspect-aware pairwise token interactions and constructs a soft latent relation graph. Rather than treating relation weights as deterministic values, BBV-GCN introduces latent relation variables and learns their posterior distributions through variational inference, thereby enabling uncertainty-aware graph construction. Based on the learned graph, a variational graph convolutional network performs multi-hop message passing to aggregate opinion cues, modifiers, negation patterns, and contrastive signals toward the target aspect representation. Experiments on five benchmark datasets, including Twitter, Laptop14, Restaurant14, Restaurant15, and Restaurant16, demonstrate that BBV-GCN achieves competitive and well-balanced performance relative to representative attention-based, Transformer-based, and graph-based baselines. Ablation studies further confirm the contributions of Bayesian relation modeling, KL regularization, and variational graph propagation. Visualization results illustrate how uncertainty-aware weighting can attenuate spurious relations and produce more interpretable aspect-specific latent graphs. Overall, BBV-GCN provides a robust and uncertainty-aware graph reasoning framework for fine-grained sentiment analysis.