Instruction Tuning for Few-Shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Siddharth Varia, Shuai Wang, Kishaloy Halder, Robert Vacareanu, Miguel Ballesteros, Yassine Benajiba, Neha Anna John, Rishita Anubhai, Smaranda Muresan, Dan Roth


Abstract
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task which involves four elements from user-generated texts:aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Most computational approaches focus on some of the ABSA sub-taskssuch as tuple (aspect term, sentiment polarity) or triplet (aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity) extraction using either pipeline or joint modeling approaches. Recently, generative approaches have been proposed to extract all four elements as (one or more) quadrupletsfrom text as a single task. In this work, we take a step further and propose a unified framework for solving ABSA, and the associated sub-tasksto improve the performance in few-shot scenarios. To this end, we fine-tune a T5 model with instructional prompts in a multi-task learning fashion covering all the sub-tasks, as well as the entire quadruple prediction task. In experiments with multiple benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed multi-task prompting approach brings performance boost (by absolute 8.29 F1) in the few-shot learning setting.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19–27
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siddharth Varia, Shuai Wang, Kishaloy Halder, Robert Vacareanu, Miguel Ballesteros, Yassine Benajiba, Neha Anna John, Rishita Anubhai, Smaranda Muresan, and Dan Roth. 2023. Instruction Tuning for Few-Shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 19–27, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Instruction Tuning for Few-Shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Varia et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.3.mp4