  Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) and aspect oriented opinion
words extraction (AOWE) are two highly relevant aspect-based sentiment analysis
(ABSA) subtasks. They respectively aim to detect the sentiment polarity and
extract the corresponding opinion words toward a given aspect in a sentence.
Previous works separate them and focus on one of them by training neural models
on small-scale labeled data, while neglecting the connections between them. In
this paper, we propose a novel joint model, Opinion Transmission Network (OTN),
to exploit the potential bridge between ALSC and AOWE to achieve the goal of
facilitating them simultaneously. Specifically, we design two tailor-made
opinion transmission mechanisms to control opinion clues flow bidirectionally,
respectively from ALSC to AOWE and AOWE to ALSC. Experiment results on two
benchmark datasets show that our joint model outperforms strong baselines on
the two tasks. Further analysis also validates the effectiveness of opinion
transmission mechanisms.
