Enhancing Aspect‐Based Sentiment Analysis via Augmented Semantic and Syntactic Graph Fusion

Abstract

Recommendation systems are rapidly evolving from static interaction‐driven models to dynamic, knowledge‐augmented architectures. A key challenge in this evolution is accurately capturing users' fine‐grained preferences from unstructured review text, which directly impacts the explainability and personalization of recommendations. As an essential enabling technology, Aspect‐Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) extracts aspect‐level sentiment elements that can be explicitly mapped to user preference vectors or product attribute ratings. With the integration of semantic and syntactic information, current works have significantly enhanced the performance of ABSA. However, existing graph‐based approaches that rely on dependency‐tree structures often converge to suboptimal solutions when handling implicit sentiment in natural language. To address this gap, we propose a graph fusion network that leverages augmented semantic and syntactic graphs. Specifically, we explicitly model word‐dependency correlations via contextual augmentation, and incorporate selected part‐of‐speech (POS) features to refine semantic graph construction. Concurrently, a syntactic graph is constructed by pruning the nodes based on the distance to the aspect term. The resulting semantic and syntactic representations are then fused through a dual graph convolutional network block, whereas the gating mechanism is used to regulate information flow during graph construction. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms baselines by up to 2.39%$$ 2.39\% $$ and 2.44%$$ 2.44\% $$ in Macro‐F1 scores, establishing new state‐of‐the‐art results and providing a more reliable sentiment extraction module for downstream recommendation tasks.