Inheriting the Wisdom of Predecessors: A Multiplex Cascade Framework for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Inheriting the Wisdom of Predecessors: A Multiplex Cascade Framework for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Hao Fei, Fei Li, Chenliang Li, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Donghong Ji

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4121-4128. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/572

So far, aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has involved with total seven subtasks, in which, however the interactions among them have been left unexplored sufficiently. This work presents a novel multiplex cascade framework for unified ABSA and maintaining such interactions. First, we model total seven subtasks as a hierarchical dependency in the easy-to-hard order, based on which we then propose a multiplex decoding mechanism, transferring the sentiment layouts and clues in lower tasks to upper ones. The multiplex strategy enables highly-efficient subtask interflows and avoids repetitive training; meanwhile it sufficiently utilizes the existing data without requiring any further annotation. Further, based on the characteristics of aspect-opinion term extraction and pairing, we enhance our multiplex framework by integrating POS tag and syntactic dependency information for term boundary and pairing identification. The proposed Syntax-aware Multiplex (SyMux) framework enhances the ABSA performances on 28 subtasks (7×4 datasets) with big margins.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining
Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction
Natural Language Processing: Text Classification