Aspect sentiment mining of short bullet screen comments from online TV series

Bullet screen comments (BSCs) are user-generated short comments that appear as real-time overlays on many video platforms, expressing the audience opinions and emotions about different aspects of the ongoing video. Unlike traditional long comments after a show, BSCs are often incomplete, ambiguous in context, and correlated over time. Current studies in sentiment analysis of BSCs rarely address these challenges, motivating us to develop an aspect-level sentiment analysis framework. Our framework, BSCNET, is a pre-trained lan-guage encoder-based deep neural classifier designed to enhance semantic understanding. A novel neighbor context construction method is proposed to uncover latent contextual correlation among BSCs over time, and we also incorporate semi-supervised learning to reduce labeling costs. The framework increases F1 (Macro) and accuracy by up to 10% and 10.2%, respectively. Addi-tionally, we have developed two novel downstream tasks. The first is noisy BSCs identification, which reached F1 (Macro) and accuracy of 90.1% and 98.3%, respectively, through fine-tuning the BSCNET. The second is the predic-tion of future episode popularity, where the MAPE is reduced by 11%-19.0% when incorporating sentiment features. Overall, this study provides a method-ology reference for aspect-level sentiment analysis of BSCs and highlights its potential for viewing experience or forthcoming content optimization.