Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain

Rui Fan, Shu Li, Tingting He, Yu Liu


Abstract
Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), the role of syntactic information remains underexplored in LLMs. Syntactic structures are known to be crucial for capturing aspect-opinion relationships. To explore whether LLMs can effectively leverage syntactic information to improve ABSA performance, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework, the Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (Syn-Chain). Syn-Chain sequentially analyzes syntactic dependencies, extracts opinions, and classifies sentiment. We introduce Syn-Chain into LLMs via zero-shot prompting, and results show that Syn-Chain significantly enhances ABSA performance, though smaller LLM exhibit weaker performance. Furthermore, we enhance smaller LLMs via distillation using GPT-3.5-generated Syn-Chain responses, achieving state-of-the-art ABSA performance. Our findings highlight the importance of syntactic information for improving LLMs in ABSA and offer valuable insights for future research.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.210
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3123–3137
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.210/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rui Fan, Shu Li, Tingting He, and Yu Liu. 2025. Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3123–3137, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (Fan et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.210.pdf