SpanMlt: A Span-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction

He Zhao, Longtao Huang, Rong Zhang, Quan Lu, Hui Xue


Abstract
Aspect terms extraction and opinion terms extraction are two key problems of fine-grained Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). The aspect-opinion pairs can provide a global profile about a product or service for consumers and opinion mining systems. However, traditional methods can not directly output aspect-opinion pairs without given aspect terms or opinion terms. Although some recent co-extraction methods have been proposed to extract both terms jointly, they fail to extract them as pairs. To this end, this paper proposes an end-to-end method to solve the task of Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction (PAOTE). Furthermore, this paper treats the problem from a perspective of joint term and relation extraction rather than under the sequence tagging formulation performed in most prior works. We propose a multi-task learning framework based on shared spans, where the terms are extracted under the supervision of span boundaries. Meanwhile, the pair-wise relations are jointly identified using the span representations. Extensive experiments show that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.296
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3239–3248
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.296
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.296
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
He Zhao, Longtao Huang, Rong Zhang, Quan Lu, and Hui Xue. 2020. SpanMlt: A Span-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3239–3248, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SpanMlt: A Span-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction (Zhao et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.296.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928713