Exploring Conditional Text Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
This work addresses aspect-based sentiment analysis for NLP applications, but it is incremental as it builds on pre-trained models and focuses on specific domains.
The authors tackled aspect-based sentiment analysis by reformulating it as a conditional text generation task, achieving new state-of-the-art results on restaurant and urban neighborhood benchmark datasets.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an NLP task that entails processing user-generated reviews to determine (i) the target being evaluated, (ii) the aspect category to which it belongs, and (iii) the sentiment expressed towards the target and aspect pair. In this article, we propose transforming ABSA into an abstract summary-like conditional text generation task that uses targets, aspects, and polarities to generate auxiliary statements. To demonstrate the efficacy of our task formulation and a proposed system, we fine-tune a pre-trained model for conditional text generation tasks to get new state-of-the-art results on a few restaurant domains and urban neighborhoods domain benchmark datasets.