Adaptive Structure Induction for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Spectral Perspective

Hao Niu, Yun Xiong, Xiaosu Wang, Wenjing Yu, Yao Zhang, Zhonglei Guo

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Keywords: Sentiment analysis, Spectral analysis, Structure induction

TL;DR: Exploring the role of scale information in the structure induction on the ABSA task from a spectral perspective.

Abstract: Recently, incorporating structure information (e.g. dependency syntactic tree) can enhance the performance of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). However, this structure information is obtained from off-the-shelf parsers, which is often sub-optimal and cumbersome. Thus, automatically learning adaptive structures is conducive to solving this problem. In this work, we concentrate on structure induction from pre-trained language models (PLMs) and throw the structure induction into a spectrum perspective to explore the impact of scale information in language representation on structure induction ability. Concretely, the main architecture of our model is composed of commonly used PLMs (e.g. RoBERTa, etc), and a simple yet effective graph structure learning (GSL) module (graph learner + GNNs). Subsequently, we plug in spectral filters with different bands respectively after the PLMs to produce filtered language representations and feed them into the GSL module to induce latent structures. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks for ABSA. The results and further analyses demonstrate that introducing this spectral approach can shorten Aspects-sentiment Distance (AsD) and be beneficial to structure induction. Even based on such a simple framework, the effects on three datasets can reach SOTA (state of the art) or near SOTA performance. Additionally, our exploration also has the potential to be generalized to other tasks or to bring inspiration to other similar domains.

Submission Number: 2555