  Target-based sentiment analysis involves opinion target extraction and target
sentiment classification. However, most of the existing works usually studied
one of these two sub-tasks alone, which hinders their practical use. This paper
aims to solve the complete task of target-based sentiment analysis in an
end-to-end fashion, and presents a novel unified model which applies a unified
tagging scheme. Our framework involves two stacked recurrent neural networks:
The upper one predicts the unified tags to produce the final output results of
the primary target-based sentiment analysis; The lower one performs an
auxiliary target boundary prediction aiming at guiding the upper network to
improve the performance of the primary task. To explore the inter-task
dependency, we propose to explicitly model the constrained transitions from
target boundaries to target sentiment polarities. We also propose to maintain
the sentiment consistency within an opinion target via a gate mechanism which
models the relation between the features for the current word and the previous
word. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and our
framework achieves consistently superior results.
