Bidirectional Generative Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Yue Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Sinno Jialin Pan, Lidong Bing


Abstract
Cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to perform various fine-grained sentiment analysis tasks on a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. Since labeled data only exists in the source domain, a model is expected to bridge the domain gap for tackling cross-domain ABSA. Though domain adaptation methods have proven to be effective, most of them are based on a discriminative model, which needs to be specifically designed for different ABSA tasks. To offer a more general solution, we propose a unified bidirectional generative framework to tackle various cross-domain ABSA tasks. Specifically, our framework trains a generative model in both text-to-label and label-to-text directions. The former transforms each task into a unified format to learn domain-agnostic features, and the latter generates natural sentences from noisy labels for data augmentation, with which a more accurate model can be trained. To investigate the effectiveness and generality of our framework, we conduct extensive experiments on four cross-domain ABSA tasks and present new state-of-the-art results on all tasks. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/BGCA.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.686
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12272–12285
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.686
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.686
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Sinno Jialin Pan, and Lidong Bing. 2023. Bidirectional Generative Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12272–12285, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bidirectional Generative Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (Deng et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.686.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.686.mp4