Error Comparison Optimization for Large Language Models on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Qianlong Wang, Keyang Ding, Hengxin Gao, Hui Wang, Ruifeng Xu
Abstract
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has enabled large language models (LLMs) to exhibit promising performance on various tasks. However, this fine-tuning process only compares current predictions and labels on each sample, yet fails to perceive and understand its error outputs from different degrees, which may potentially produce a large percentage of serious errors. This poses a problem for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in that these serious errors bring a greater negative impact than acceptable ones. Humans tend to compare mistakes to understand the varying degrees of mistakes, thus avoiding major bad decisions. Inspired by this, we propose a simple yet effective framework that could perceive and understand the degree of different errors by learning from comparative error pairs. It utilizes the SFT model to yield multiple outputs on each sample and selects acceptable and severe errors based on the acceptable scores. Together with the labels, we construct two comparative error pairs and exploit their calibration losses to optimize parameters. We conduct comprehensive experiments on ABSA datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over baselines.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-long.913
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 18630–18646
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.913/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Qianlong Wang, Keyang Ding, Hengxin Gao, Hui Wang, and Ruifeng Xu. 2025. Error Comparison Optimization for Large Language Models on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 18630–18646, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Error Comparison Optimization for Large Language Models on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.913.pdf