Aspect Is Not You Need: No-aspect Differential Sentiment Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Jiahao Cao, Rui Liu, Huailiang Peng, Lei Jiang, Xu Bai


Abstract
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Most recent efforts adopt pre-trained model to classify the sentences with aspects. However, the aspect sentiment bias from pre-trained model brings some noise to the ABSA task. Besides, traditional methods using cross-entropy loss are hard to find the potential associations between sentiment polarities. In this work, we analyze the ABSA task from a novel cognition perspective: humans can often judge the sentiment of an aspect even if they do not know what the aspect is. Moreover, it is easier to distinguish positive and negative sentiments than others for human beings because positive and negative are two opposite sentiments. To this end, we propose a no-aspect differential sentiment (NADS) framework for the ABSA task. We first design a no-aspect template by replacing the aspect with a special unbiased character to eliminate the sentiment bias and obtain a stronger representation. To better get the benefits from the template, we adopt contrastive learning between the no-aspect template and the original sentence. Then we propose a differential sentiment loss instead of the cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments by distinguishing the different distances between sentiments. Our proposed model is a general framework and can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. Experiments on SemEval 2014 show that our framework is still able to predict the sentiment of the aspect even we don’t konw what the aspect is. Moreover, our NADS framework boosts three typical ABSA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.115
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1599–1609
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.115
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.115
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiahao Cao, Rui Liu, Huailiang Peng, Lei Jiang, and Xu Bai. 2022. Aspect Is Not You Need: No-aspect Differential Sentiment Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1599–1609, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aspect Is Not You Need: No-aspect Differential Sentiment Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (Cao et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.115.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.115.mp4