Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FGSA) aims to identify sentiment polarity toward specific aspects within a text, enabling more precise opinion mining in domains such as product reviews and social media. However, traditional FGSA approaches often require task-specific architectures and extensive annotated data, limiting their generalization and scalability. To address these challenges, we propose PL-FGSA, a unified prompt learning-based framework implemented using the MindSpore platform, which integrates prompt design with a lightweight TextCNN backbone. Our method reformulates FGSA as a multi-task prompt-augmented generation problem, jointly tackling aspect extraction, sentiment classification, and causal explanation in a unified paradigm. By leveraging prompt-based guidance, PL-FGSA enhances interpretability and achieves strong performance under both full-data and low-resource conditions. Experiments on three benchmark datasets-SST-2, SemEval-2014 Task 4, and MAMS-demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods and achieves F1-scores of 0.922, 0.694, and 0.597, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of prompt-based generalization and highlight the practical value of PL-FGSA for real-world sentiment analysis tasks.
This study examines the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), with a focus on implicit aspect extraction in a novel domain. Using a synthetic sports feedback dataset, we evaluate open-weight LLMs' ability to extract aspect-polarity pairs and propose a metric to facilitate the evaluation of aspect extraction with generative models. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in the ABSA task.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis has gained significant attention in recent years due to its ability to provide fine-grained insights for sentiment expressions related to specific features of entities. An important component of aspect-based sentiment analysis is aspect extraction, which involves identifying and extracting aspect terms from text. Effective aspect extraction serves as the foundation for accurate sentiment analysis at the aspect level. In this paper, we propose aspect extraction models that use different types of embeddings for words and part-of-speech tags and that combine several learning models. We also propose tree positional encoding that is based on dependency parsing output to capture better the aspect positions in sentences. In addition, a new aspect extraction dataset is built for Turkish by machine translating an English dataset in a controlled setting. The experiments conducted on two Turkish datasets showed that the proposed models mostly outperform the studies that use the same datasets, and incorporating tree positional encoding increases the performance of the models.
Existing zero-shot product attribute value (aspect) extraction approaches in e-Commerce industry rely on uni-modal or multi-modal models, where the sellers are asked to provide detailed textual inputs (product descriptions) for the products. However, manually providing (typing) the product descriptions is time-consuming and frustrating for the sellers. Thus, we propose a cross-modal zero-shot attribute value generation framework (ViOC-AG) based on CLIP, which only requires product images as the inputs. ViOC-AG follows a text-only training process, where a task-customized text decoder is trained with the frozen CLIP text encoder to alleviate the modality gap and task disconnection. During the zero-shot inference, product aspects are generated by the frozen CLIP image encoder connected with the trained task-customized text decoder. OCR tokens and outputs from a frozen prompt-based LLM correct the decoded outputs for out-of-domain attribute values. Experiments show that ViOC-AG significantly outperforms other fine-tuned vision-language models for zero-shot attribute value extraction.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ASBA) is a refined approach to sentiment analysis that aims to extract and classify sentiments based on specific aspects or features of a product, service, or entity. Unlike traditional sentiment analysis, which assigns a general sentiment score to entire reviews or texts, ABSA focuses on breaking down the text into individual components or aspects (e.g., quality, price, service) and evaluating the sentiment towards each. This allows for a more granular level of understanding of customer opinions, enabling businesses to pinpoint specific areas of strength and improvement. The process involves several key steps, including aspect extraction, sentiment classification, and aspect-level sentiment aggregation for a review paragraph or any other form that the users have provided. ABSA has significant applications in areas such as product reviews, social media monitoring, customer feedback analysis, and market research. By leveraging techniques from natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, ABSA facilitates the extraction of valuable insights, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions that enhance customer satisfaction and optimize offerings. As ABSA evolves, it holds the potential to greatly improve personalized customer experiences by providing a deeper understanding of sentiment across various product aspects. In this work, we have analyzed the strength of LLMs for a complete cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis with the aim of defining the framework for certain products and using it for other similar situations. We argue that it is possible to that at an effectiveness of 92\% accuracy for the Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis dataset of SemEval-2015 Task 12.
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that focuses on extracting sentiments related to specific aspects within a text, offering deep insights into customer opinions. Traditional sentiment analysis methods, while useful for determining overall sentiment, often miss the implicit opinions about particular product or service features. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the evolution of ABSA methodologies, from lexicon-based approaches to machine learning and deep learning techniques. We emphasize the recent advancements in Transformer-based models, particularly Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and its variants, which have set new benchmarks in ABSA tasks. We focused on finetuning Llama and Mistral models, building hybrid models using the SetFit framework, and developing our own model by exploiting the strengths of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based models for aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect sentiment classification (ASC). Our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa uses SOTA InstructABSA for aspect extraction and DeBERTa-V3-baseabsa-V1 for aspect sentiment classification. We utilize datasets from different domains to evaluate our model's performance. Our experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid model significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of sentiment analysis across all experimented domains. As per our findings, our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa is the best-performing model for the joint task of ATE and ASC for both SemEval restaurant 2014 and SemEval laptop 2014 datasets separately. By addressing the limitations of existing methodologies, our approach provides a robust solution for understanding detailed consumer feedback, thus offering valuable insights for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction and product development.
In the world of business, products need to evolve adjusting to the needs of the customer to ensure customer satisfaction. The abundance of opinionated text on the internet contains suggestions made by users that can be used to improve products. These suggestions are important to multiple stakeholders; as product improvements for businesses or as tips and advice to consumers. Until now, the extraction of suggestions has usually been defined as a problem of classifying sentences into suggestion and non-suggestion classes. No work has attempted to differentiate suggestions on the basis of intended receiver. Extracting these suggestions with respect to the aspects that reviewers are not satisfied with, could be used as a potential solution to improve products. To address these shortcomings, this study proposes a novel task decomposition called Aspect Oriented Suggestion Extraction to identify product improvements. It contains three main subtasks: suggestion classification, beneficiary classification and aspect extraction. The proposed approach proved to be very effective in determining suggestions from non-suggestions, achieving an F-score of 91% with BERT pretrained language model, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on suggestion mining. Experimental results on hotel reviews show the effectiveness of the techniques. The proposed framework, being the first of its nature, yields promising results.
E-Commerce (EC) websites provide a large amount of useful information that exceed human cognitive processing ability. In order to help customers in comparing alternatives when buying a product, previous studies designed opinion summarization systems based on customer reviews. They ignored templates' information provided by manufacturers, although these descriptive information have much product aspects or characteristics. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology coined as SEOpinion (Summa-rization and Exploration of Opinions) which provides a summary for the product aspects and spots opinion(s) regarding them, using a combination of templates' information with the customer reviews in two main phases. First, the Hierarchical Aspect Extraction (HAE) phase creates a hierarchy of product aspects from the template. Subsequently, the Hierarchical Aspect-based Opinion Summarization (HAOS) phase enriches this hierarchy with customers' opinions; to be shown to other potential buyers. To test the feasibility of using Deep Learning-based BERT techniques with our approach, we have created a corpus by gathering information from the top five EC websites for laptops. The experimental results show that Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) achieves better results (77.4% and 82.6% in terms of F1-measure for the first and second phase) than the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) technique.
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a task whose objective is to classify the individual sentiment polarity of all entities, called aspects, in a sentence. The task is composed of two subtasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), identify all aspect terms in a sentence; and Sentiment Orientation Extraction (SOE), given a sentence and its aspect terms, the task is to determine the sentiment polarity of each aspect term (positive, negative or neutral). This article presents we present our participation in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in Portuguese (ABSAPT) 2022 at IberLEF 2022. We submitted the best performing systems, achieving new state-of-the-art results on both subtasks.
Being able to extract from scientific papers their main points, key insights, and other important information, referred to here as aspects, might facilitate the process of conducting a scientific literature review. Therefore, the aim of our research is to create a tool for automatic aspect extraction from Russian-language scientific texts of any domain. In this paper, we present a cross-domain dataset of scientific texts in Russian, annotated with such aspects as Task, Contribution, Method, and Conclusion, as well as a baseline algorithm for aspect extraction, based on the multilingual BERT model fine-tuned on our data. We show that there are some differences in aspect representation in different domains, but even though our model was trained on a limited number of scientific domains, it is still able to generalize to new domains, as was proved by cross-domain experiments. The code and the dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/anna-marshalova/automatic-aspect-extraction-from-scientific-texts}.
With the rise of foundation models, a new artificial intelligence paradigm has emerged, by simply using general purpose foundation models with prompting to solve problems instead of training a separate machine learning model for each problem. Such models have been shown to have emergent properties of solving problems that they were not initially trained on. The studies for the effectiveness of such models are still quite limited. In this work, we widely study the capabilities of the ChatGPT models, namely GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, on 13 affective computing problems, namely aspect extraction, aspect polarity classification, opinion extraction, sentiment analysis, sentiment intensity ranking, emotions intensity ranking, suicide tendency detection, toxicity detection, well-being assessment, engagement measurement, personality assessment, sarcasm detection, and subjectivity detection. We introduce a framework to evaluate the ChatGPT models on regression-based problems, such as intensity ranking problems, by modelling them as pairwise ranking classification. We compare ChatGPT against more traditional NLP methods, such as end-to-end recurrent neural networks and transformers. The results demonstrate the emergent abilities of the ChatGPT models on a wide range of affective computing problems, where GPT-3.5 and especially GPT-4 have shown strong performance on many problems, particularly the ones related to sentiment, emotions, or toxicity. The ChatGPT models fell short for problems with implicit signals, such as engagement measurement and subjectivity detection.
Existing aspect extraction methods mostly rely on explicit or ground truth aspect information, or using data mining or machine learning approaches to extract aspects from implicit user feedback such as user reviews. It however remains under-explored how the extracted aspects can help generate more meaningful recommendations to the users. Meanwhile, existing research on aspect-based recommendations often relies on separate aspect extraction models or assumes the aspects are given, without accounting for the fact the optimal set of aspects could be dependent on the recommendation task at hand. In this work, we propose to combine aspect extraction together with aspect-based recommendations in an end-to-end manner, achieving the two goals together in a single framework. For the aspect extraction component, we leverage the recent advances in large language models and design a new prompt learning mechanism to generate aspects for the end recommendation task. For the aspect-based recommendation component, the extracted aspects are concatenated with the usual user and item features used by the recommendation model. The recommendation task mediates the learning of the user embeddings and item embeddings, which are used as soft prompts to generate aspects. Therefore, the extracted aspects are personalized and contextualized by the recommendation task. We showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments on three industrial datasets, where our proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both the personalized aspect extraction and aspect-based recommendation tasks. In particular, we demonstrate that it is necessary and beneficial to combine the learning of aspect extraction and aspect-based recommendation together. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to understand the contribution of each design component in our framework.
We explore how weak supervision on abundant unlabeled data can be leveraged to improve few-shot performance in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks. We propose a pipeline approach to construct a noisy ABSA dataset, and we use it to adapt a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model to the ABSA tasks. We test the resulting model on three widely used ABSA datasets, before and after fine-tuning. Our proposed method preserves the full fine-tuning performance while showing significant improvements (15.84% absolute F1) in the few-shot learning scenario for the harder tasks. In zero-shot (i.e., without fine-tuning), our method outperforms the previous state of the art on the aspect extraction sentiment classification (AESC) task and is, additionally, capable of performing the harder aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) task.
Opinion target extraction (OTE) or aspect extraction (AE) is a fundamental task in opinion mining that aims to extract the targets (or aspects) on which opinions have been expressed. Recent work focus on cross-domain OTE, which is typically encountered in real-world scenarios, where the testing and training distributions differ. Most methods use domain adversarial neural networks that aim to reduce the domain gap between the labelled source and unlabelled target domains to improve target domain performance. However, this approach only aligns feature distributions and does not account for class-wise feature alignment, leading to suboptimal results. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been explored as a solution, but is limited by the quality of pseudo-labels generated by the model. Inspired by the theoretical foundations in domain adaptation [2], we propose a new SSL approach that opts for selecting target samples whose model output from a domain-specific teacher and student network disagree on the unlabelled target data, in an effort to boost the target domain performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark cross-domain OTE datasets show that this approach is effective and performs consistently well in settings with large domain shifts.
We introduce InstructABSA, an instruction learning paradigm for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) subtasks. Our method introduces positive, negative, and neutral examples to each training sample, and instruction tune the model (Tk-Instruct) for ABSA subtasks, yielding significant performance improvements. Experimental results on the Sem Eval 2014, 15, and 16 datasets demonstrate that InstructABSA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on Term Extraction (ATE), Sentiment Classification(ATSC) and Sentiment Pair Extraction (ASPE) subtasks. In particular, InstructABSA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Rest14 ATE subtask by 5.69% points, the Rest15 ATSC subtask by 9.59% points, and the Lapt14 AOPE subtask by 3.37% points, surpassing 7x larger models. We also get competitive results on AOOE, AOPE, and AOSTE subtasks indicating strong generalization ability to all subtasks. Exploring sample efficiency reveals that just 50% train data is required to get competitive results with other instruction tuning approaches. Lastly, we assess the quality of instructions and observe that InstructABSA's performance experiences a decline of ~10% when adding misleading examples.
Previous studies usually divided aspect-based sentiment analysis into several subtasks in pipeline, i.e., first aspect term and/or opinion term extraction, then aspect-based sentiment prediction, resulting in error propagation and external resources dependency. To overcome the problems mentioned above, in this work we present a novel one-stop solution on aspect-based sentiment analysis. Specifically, we propose a novel multi-task neural learning framework to jointly tackle aspect extraction and sentiment prediction subtasks at the same time, and leverage attention mechanisms to learn the joint representation of aspect-sentiment relationship. We have conducted extensive comparative experiments on two benchmark datasets from SemEval-2014. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Especially, our multi-task model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on aspect extraction subtask.
Opinion mining is the branch of computation that deals with opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions of people and their different aspects. This field has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. Aspect-level (called aspect-based opinion mining) is often desired in practical applications as it provides detailed opinions or sentiments about different aspects of entities and entities themselves, which are usually required for action. Aspect extraction and entity extraction are thus two core tasks of aspect-based opinion mining. his paper has presented a framework of aspect-based opinion mining based on the concept of transfer learning. on real-world customer reviews available on the Amazon website. The model has yielded quite satisfactory results in its task of aspect-based opinion mining.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to provide fine-grained aspect-level sentiment information. There are many ABSA tasks, and the current dominant paradigm is to train task-specific models for each task. However, application scenarios of ABSA tasks are often diverse. This solution usually requires a large amount of labeled data from each task to perform excellently. These dedicated models are separately trained and separately predicted, ignoring the relationship between tasks. To tackle these issues, we present UnifiedABSA, a general-purpose ABSA framework based on multi-task instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various tasks and capture the inter-task dependency with multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that UnifiedABSA can significantly outperform dedicated models on 11 ABSA tasks and show its superiority in terms of data efficiency.
The extraction of aspect terms is a critical step in fine-grained sentiment analysis of text. Existing approaches for this task have yielded impressive results when the training and testing data are from the same domain. However, these methods show a drastic decrease in performance when applied to cross-domain settings where the domain of the testing data differs from that of the training data. To address this lack of extensibility and robustness, we propose a novel approach for automatically constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs that contain information relevant to the identification of aspect terms. We introduce a methodology for injecting information from these knowledge graphs into Transformer models, including two alternative mechanisms for knowledge insertion: via query enrichment and via manipulation of attention patterns. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets for cross-domain aspect term extraction using our approach and investigate how the amount of external knowledge available to the Transformer impacts model performance.
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis is the most granular form of sentiment analysis that can be performed on the documents / sentences. Besides delivering the most insights at a finer grain, it also poses equally daunting challenges. One of them being the shortage of labelled data. To bring in value right out of the box for the text data being generated at a very fast pace in today's world, unsupervised aspect-based sentiment analysis allows us to generate insights without investing time or money in generating labels. From topic modelling approaches to recent deep learning-based aspect extraction models, this domain has seen a lot of development. One of the models that we improve upon is ABAE that reconstructs the sentences as a linear combination of aspect terms present in it, In this research we explore how we can use information from another unsupervised model to regularize ABAE, leading to better performance. We contrast it with baseline rule based ensemble and show that the ensemble methods work better than the individual models and the regularization based ensemble performs better than the rule-based one.