Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam


Abstract
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. Most existing work tackles ABSA in a discriminative manner, designing various task-specific classification networks for the prediction. Despite their effectiveness, these methods ignore the rich label semantics in ABSA problems and require extensive task-specific designs. In this paper, we propose to tackle various ABSA tasks in a unified generative framework. Two types of paradigms, namely annotation-style and extraction-style modeling, are designed to enable the training process by formulating each ABSA task as a text generation problem. We conduct experiments on four ABSA tasks across multiple benchmark datasets where our proposed generative approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all cases. This also validates the strong generality of the proposed framework which can be easily adapted to arbitrary ABSA task without additional task-specific model design.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
504–510
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam. 2021. Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 504–510, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Zhang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.acl-short.64.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.acl-short.64.mp4
Code
 IsakZhang/Generative-ABSA
Data
ASQPASTEASTE-Data-V2TASD