An Empirical Study of Sentiment-Enhanced Pre-Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Yice Zhang, Yifan Yang, Bin Liang, Shiwei Chen, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu


Abstract
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to recognize fine-grained opinions and sentiments of users, which is an important problem in sentiment analysis. Recent work has shown that Sentiment-enhanced Pre-Training (SPT) can substantially improve the performance of various ABSA tasks. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive evaluation and fair comparison of existing SPT approaches. Therefore, this paper performs an empirical study to investigate the effectiveness of different SPT approaches. First, we develop an effective knowledge-mining method and leverage it to build a large-scale knowledge-annotated SPT corpus. Second, we systematically analyze the impact of integrating sentiment knowledge and other linguistic knowledge in pre-training. For each type of sentiment knowledge, we also examine and compare multiple integration methods. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a wide range of ABSA tasks to see how much SPT can facilitate the understanding of aspect-level sentiments.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.612
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9633–9651
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.612
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.612
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yice Zhang, Yifan Yang, Bin Liang, Shiwei Chen, Bing Qin, and Ruifeng Xu. 2023. An Empirical Study of Sentiment-Enhanced Pre-Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9633–9651, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Study of Sentiment-Enhanced Pre-Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.612.pdf