Progressive Self-Training with Discriminator for Aspect Term Extraction

Qianlong Wang, Zhiyuan Wen, Qin Zhao, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu


Abstract
Aspect term extraction aims to extract aspect terms from a review sentence that users have expressed opinions on. One of the remaining challenges for aspect term extraction resides in the lack of sufficient annotated data. While self-training is potentially an effective method to address this issue, the pseudo-labels it yields on unlabeled data could induce noise. In this paper, we use two means to alleviate the noise in the pseudo-labels. One is that inspired by the curriculum learning, we refine the conventional self-training to progressive self-training. Specifically, the base model infers pseudo-labels on a progressive subset at each iteration, where samples in the subset become harder and more numerous as the iteration proceeds. The other is that we use a discriminator to filter the noisy pseudo-labels. Experimental results on four SemEval datasets show that our model significantly outperforms the previous baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
257–268
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qianlong Wang, Zhiyuan Wen, Qin Zhao, Min Yang, and Ruifeng Xu. 2021. Progressive Self-Training with Discriminator for Aspect Term Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 257–268, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Progressive Self-Training with Discriminator for Aspect Term Extraction (Wang et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.23.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.23.mp4
Data
SemEval-2014 Task-4