Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification with Contrastive Learning and Mutual Information Maximization
This addresses sentiment classification across domains (e.g., product reviews to airline reviews) where target labels are scarce, representing an incremental advance in domain adaptation for NLP.
The paper tackles cross-domain sentiment classification by proposing CLIM, which combines contrastive learning with mutual information maximization to handle label scarcity in target domains. The method achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Amazon-review and airlines datasets.
Contrastive learning (CL) has been successful as a powerful representation learning method. In this work we propose CLIM: Contrastive Learning with mutual Information Maximization, to explore the potential of CL on cross-domain sentiment classification. To the best of our knowledge, CLIM is the first to adopt contrastive learning for natural language processing (NLP) tasks across domains. Due to scarcity of labels on the target domain, we introduce mutual information maximization (MIM) apart from CL to exploit the features that best support the final prediction. Furthermore, MIM is able to maintain a relatively balanced distribution of the model's prediction, and enlarges the margin between classes on the target domain. The larger margin increases our model's robustness and enables the same classifier to be optimal across domains. Consequently, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on the Amazon-review dataset as well as the airlines dataset, showing the efficacy of our proposed method CLIM.