Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction has received widespread attention in the field of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Existing studies extract quadruplets via pre-trained generative language models to paraphrase the original sentence into a templated target sequence. However, previous works only focus on what to generate but ignore what not to generate. We argue that considering the negative samples also leads to potential benefits. In this work, we propose a template-agnostic method to control the token-level generation, which boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce Monte Carlo dropout to understand the built-in uncertainty of pre-trained language models, acquiring the noises and errors. We further propose marginalized unlikelihood learning to suppress the uncertainty-aware mistake tokens. Finally, we introduce minimization entropy to balance the effects of marginalized unlikelihood learning. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various generation templates.

Nowadays, transformer-based models gradually become the default choice for artificial intelligence pioneers. The models also show superiority even in the few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the classical methods and propose a new few-shot alternative. Specifically, we investigate the few-shot one-class problem, which actually takes a known sample as a reference to detect whether an unknown instance belongs to the same class. This problem can be studied from the perspective of sequence match. It is shown that with meta-learning, the classical sequence match method, i.e. Compare-Aggregate, significantly outperforms transformer ones. The classical approach requires much less training cost. Furthermore, we perform an empirical comparison between two kinds of sequence match approaches under simple fine-tuning and meta-learning. Meta-learning causes the transformer models’ features to have high-correlation dimensions. The reason is closely related to the number of layers and heads of transformer models. Experimental codes and data are available at https://github.com/hmt2014/FewOne.

Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has become a popular task in the field of aspect-level sentiment analysis. Previous work utilizes a predefined template to paraphrase the original sentence into a structure target sequence, which can be easily decoded as quadruplets of the form (aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity). The template involves the four elements in a fixed order. However, we observe that this solution contradicts with the order-free property of the ASQP task, since there is no need to fix the template order as long as the quadruplet is extracted correctly. Inspired by the observation, we study the effects of template orders and find that some orders help the generative model achieve better performance. It is hypothesized that different orders provide various views of the quadruplet. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method to identify the most proper orders, and further combine multiple proper templates as data augmentation to improve the ASQP task. Specifically, we use the pre-trained language model to select the orders with minimal entropy. By fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with these template orders, our approach improves the performance of quad prediction, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings.