Source-free Domain Adaptation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Zishuo Zhao, Ziyang Ma, Zhenzhou Lin, Jingyou Xie, Yinghui Li, Ying Shen

Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of the Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) task aims to transfer knowledge learned from labeled source domain datasets to unlabeled target domains on the assumption that samples from the source domain are freely accessible during the training period. However, this assumption can easily lead to privacy invasion issues in real-world applications, especially when the source data involves privacy-preserving domains such as healthcare and finance. In this paper, we introduce the Source-Free Domain Adaptation Framework for ABSA (SF-ABSA), which only allows model parameter transfer, not data transfer, between different domains. Specifically, the proposed SF-ABSA framework consists of two parts, i.e., feature-based adaptation and pseudo-label-based adaptation. Experiment results on four benchmarks show that the proposed framework performs competitively with traditional unsupervised domain adaptation methods under the premise of insufficient information, which demonstrates the superiority of our method under privacy conditions.