Zero-Shot to Full-Resource: Cross-lingual Transfer Strategies for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Jakob Fehle, Nils Constantin Hellwig, Udo Kruschwitz, Christian Wolff


Abstract
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) extracts fine-grained opinions toward specific aspects within text but remains largely English-focused despite major advances in transformer-based and instruction-tuned models. This work presents a multilingual evaluation of state-of-the-art ABSA approaches across seven languages and four subtasks (ACD, ACSA, TASD, ASQP). We systematically compare different transformer architectures under zero-resource, data-only, and full-resource settings, using cross-lingual transfer, code-switching and machine translation. Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve the highest overall scores, particularly in complex generative tasks, while few-shot counterparts approach this performance in simpler setups, where smaller encoder models also remain competitive. Cross-lingual training on multiple non-target languages yields the strongest transfer for fine-tuned LLMs, while smaller encoder or seq-to-seq models benefit most from code-switching, highlighting architecture-specific strategies for multilingual ABSA. We further contribute two new German datasets, an adapted GERestaurant and the first German ASQP dataset (GERest), to encourage multilingual ABSA research beyond English.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.635
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7999–8013
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-635
DOI:
10.63317/3fpqpgsdobd6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jakob Fehle, Nils Constantin Hellwig, Udo Kruschwitz, and Christian Wolff. 2026. Zero-Shot to Full-Resource: Cross-lingual Transfer Strategies for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7999–8013, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot to Full-Resource: Cross-lingual Transfer Strategies for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Fehle et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: