Our work addresses the problem of unsupervised Aspect Category Detection using a small set of seed words. Recent works have focused on learning embedding spaces for seed words and sentences to establish similarities between sentences and aspects. However, aspect representations are limited by the quality of initial seed words, and model performances are compromised by noise. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a simple framework that automatically enhances the quality of initial seed words and selects high-quality sentences for training instead of using the entire dataset. Our main concepts are to add a number of seed words to the initial set and to treat the task of noise resolution as a task of augmenting data for a low-resource task. In addition, we jointly train Aspect Category Detection with Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect Term Polarity to further enhance performance. This approach facilitates shared representation learning, allowing Aspect Category Detection to benefit from the additional guidance offered by other tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework surpasses strong baselines on standard datasets.

Aspect detection is a fundamental task in opinion mining. Previous works use seed words either as priors of topic models, as anchors to guide the learning of aspects, or as features of aspect classifiers. This paper presents a novel weakly-supervised method to exploit seed words for aspect detection based on an encoder architecture. The encoder maps segments and aspects into a low-dimensional embedding space. The goal is approximating similarity between segments and aspects in the embedding space and their ground-truth similarity generated from seed words. An objective function is proposed to capture the uncertainty of ground-truth similarity. Our method outperforms previous works on several benchmarks in various domains.