As a fundamental task in opinion mining, aspect and opinion co-extraction aims to identify the aspect terms and opinion terms in reviews. However, due to the lack of fine-grained annotated resources, it is hard to train a robust model for many domains. To alleviate this issue, unsupervised domain adaptation is proposed to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we propose a new Generative Cross-Domain Data Augmentation framework for unsupervised domain adaptation. The proposed framework is aimed to generate target-domain data with fine-grained annotation by exploiting the labeled data in the source domain. Specifically, we remove the domain-specific segments in a source-domain labeled sentence, and then use this as input to a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model BART to simultaneously generate a target-domain sentence and predict the corresponding label for each word. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our approach is more effective than previous domain adaptation methods.

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a challenging task due to the complex characteristics of Chinese characters. Statistics reveal that most Chinese spelling errors belong to phonological or visual errors. However, previous methods rarely utilize phonological and morphological knowledge of Chinese characters or heavily rely on external resources to model their similarities. To address the above issues, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable model called PHMOSpell, which promotes the performance of CSC with multi-modal information. Specifically, we derive pinyin and glyph representations for Chinese characters from audio and visual modalities respectively, which are integrated into a pre-trained language model by a well-designed adaptive gating mechanism. To verify its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation tests. Experimental results on three shared benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

Review summarization aims to generate a condensed summary for a review or multiple reviews. Existing review summarization systems mainly generate summary only based on review content and neglect the authors’ attributes (e.g., gender, age, and occupation). In fact, when summarizing a review, users with different attributes usually pay attention to specific aspects and have their own word-using habits or writing styles. Therefore, we propose an Attribute-aware Sequence Network (ASN) to take the aforementioned users’ characteristics into account, which includes three modules: an attribute encoder encodes the attribute preferences over the words; an attribute-aware review encoder adopts an attribute-based selective mechanism to select the important information of a review; and an attribute-aware summary decoder incorporates attribute embedding and attribute-specific word-using habits into word prediction. To validate our model, we collect a new dataset TripAtt, comprising 495,440 attribute-review-summary triplets with three kinds of attribute information: gender, age, and travel status. Extensive experiments show that ASN achieves state-of-the-art performance on review summarization in both auto-metric ROUGE and human evaluation.

Document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification aims to predict user’s sentiment polarities for different aspects of a product in a review. Existing approaches mainly focus on text information. However, the authors (i.e. users) and overall ratings of reviews are ignored, both of which are proved to be significant on interpreting the sentiments of different aspects in this paper. Therefore, we propose a model called Hierarchical User Aspect Rating Network (HUARN) to consider user preference and overall ratings jointly. Specifically, HUARN adopts a hierarchical architecture to encode word, sentence, and document level information. Then, user attention and aspect attention are introduced into building sentence and document level representation. The document representation is combined with user and overall rating information to predict aspect ratings of a review. Diverse aspects are treated differently and a multi-task framework is adopted. Empirical results on two real-world datasets show that HUARN achieves state-of-the-art performances.