@inproceedings{hosseini-asl-etal-2022-generative,
    title = "A Generative Language Model for Few-shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis",
    author = "Hosseini-Asl, Ehsan  and
      Liu, Wenhao  and
      Xiong, Caiming",
    editor = "Carpuat, Marine  and
      de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine  and
      Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.findings-naacl.58/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.58",
    pages = "770--787",
    abstract = "Sentiment analysis is an important task in natural language processing. In recent works, pre-trained language models are often used to achieve state-of-the-art results, especially when training data is scarce. It is common to fine-tune on the downstream task, usually by adding task-specific layers on top of the model. In this paper, we focus on aspect-based sentiment analysis, which involves extracting aspect term, category, and predicting their corresponding polarities. In particular, we are interested in few-shot settings. We propose to reformulate the extraction and prediction tasks into the sequence generation task, using a generative language model with unidirectional attention (GPT2 is used unless stated otherwise). This way, the model learns to accomplish the tasks via language generation without the need of training task-specific layers. Our evaluation results on the single-task polarity prediction show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (based on BERT) on average performance by a large margins in few-shot and full-shot settings. More importantly, our generative approach significantly reduces the model variance caused by low-resource data. We further demonstrate that the proposed generative language model can handle joint and multi-task settings, unlike previous work. We observe that the proposed sequence generation method achieves further improved performances on polarity prediction when the model is trained via joint and multi-task settings. Further evaluation on similar sentiment analysis datasets, SST-2, SST-5 and OOS intent detection validates the superiority and noise robustness of generative language model in few-shot settings."
}